A workshop exploring (1) the Territories of Life concept adopted by the ICCA (Indigenous and community conserved areas) consortium. Topics arising include the rights of nature, inter-peoples’ alliances, livelihoods and food sovereignty, resource extraction, Indigenous legal ontologies, spirit-centered biodiversity protection, degrowth and resurgence.

Following this, (2) we will explore ethnographic method as art, given its propensity for deep listening, improvisation, emotional intelligence, community collaboration, and sensory techne, as well as its necessity to attend to the heart of the ordinary person at the center of the Universe.

Finally, (3) we will collectively imagine how, as an international community of artists, we might work towards creating a shared, future/hypothetical ToL from Paf and Massia.

Some reading will focus on The Falling Sky by Davi Kopenawa and The Day of Shelly’s Death by Renato Rosaldo, complemented by an emerging case study on the Chateauguay and Champlain Watersheds in North America.

Through a combination of presentations, discussions, writing and performative experiments, Lore and James will collectively explore poetic notions of excess by way of grillz and the monstrous. Exploring its various threats to concrete subject positions, given in the material expressions of an inexpressible lack or void; the crystallisation of blackness’s dark luminosity, its abyssal opening; the deformation of an authentic subjectivity through the formation of an inauthentic human figure; and modes of decadent enjoyment and unproductive labour beyond racial wealth and abjection, our heed will be to intercept the historic cultural-aesthetic legacies of stable, idealised notions of the self and the community.

Recently I became very interested in the names given to space shuttles and launch vehicles. Ariane, Saturn, Columbia, Discovery, Enterprise, Falcon …I imagined obscure little think tanks where spaceships were christened, wondering if their chosen names had any responsibility in the success or failure of a mission. Did Endeavor succeed and Challenger disintegrate into thin air because of their respective names? Is it possible to misname certain things? Is it possible that names curse the things they represent? Sometimes I believe so.
‍
A name is a mechanic. It contains technological promises, some work, some don’t. This tiny immaterial cog inscribed on the fuselage of a spaceship, the patch of an astronaut's jacket, encapsulates a technology so precious - so capricious - that if you give it the wrong name, I fear a short-circuit would run through it and ruin the mission. If named wrong, things fail, decay, explode and disintegrate. It may be an overstatement but that's how I picture the mechanics at work in a poem.

1. A short history of rave techno

2. Electronic music production as an anti-capitalist gesture

These two workshops are based on the idea that techno both reflects a dystopian view on society and has the power to refuse to become part of it. The means of production do not require great amounts of capital or extensive training. The first session will start off with some context on electronic dance music, after which we will look at how to use the available tools at PAF to record and play back sounds. The second session is aimed at building instruments with samples and learning the basics of mixing tracks in dj software.

Work Hard! Play Hard! working group invites you for an evening on
‍
Reverse strike
Time strike
Abstract strike
Molecular strike
Care strike
Preemptive strike
Labor strike
Strike-event
Strike-gap
Infrastructure strike
Feminist strike
Imaginary strike
‍
The strike interrupts the logistical chains of oppression, destroys the infrastructure of the dominant temporalities, frees up energy, and provides resources to implement other infrastructures. Job refusals, interruption gestures, various types of sabotage, queer temporalities, workers solidarity, modern moprs, achcs and internationals. Let's investigate how this gap, open time, instability and risk function not only for us who live in public ruins, but to those who invest time and energy in breaking down or suspending the infrastructures of oppression. The strike works as a practice of freeing up time to build-out and maintain the necessary structures and perpendicular institutions.‍

A black and white analog photography workshop, from start to finish : taking a photo on an analog camera with black and white film, developing the negative film yourself, and then making a print in the darkroom on an enlarger and developing it.

Trans-Formations is an attempt to articulate an account of trans-subjectivity and its implications for radical performance, which is to say, radical political action. How is “trans” formed? Is it a form? How does it transform our patriarchal actuality?

This articulation will be philosophical, though its mode of presentation will not always be such. This is an attempt to draw an ethnography that is indistinguishable from its philosophical moments, drawing attention to the points of resistance to, and of, interpretation.

Moving between lecture, discussion and performance, we will advance lines of thought from Fred Moten, SOPHIE, D’Arcy Thompson, and Adorno, mapping modes of trans resistance in the present.

Rasp 1. a coarse file or similar metal tool for scraping, filing, or rubbing down objects of metal, wood, or other hard material. 2. a harsh, grating noise.

Two materials meet in movement, there is friction and one gives in to the other. Form and temperature shift. Rasp departs from an interest in the transformation occurring between a dance and the surfaces of its environment.

This workshop is divided into two parts. In the first part we will propose structures and methods for making a series of dance phrases focusing on setting steps, figures and rhythms without questioning the material during the process. Later, we will perform the dances elsewhere. Watching each other's dances we will spend time articulating how the particularities of each dance land in new rooms and environments. What gaze does the dance produce and how does it alter our perception of the surroundings?

It is said that the Tarot is a book left unbound, for everyone to write their own story.

Each card is a page, a lesson, a piece of wisdom.

This is an invitation to adventure in the pages of the Tarot.Like the Fool, you'll be journeying through the Major Arcanas, facing their trials, overcoming their obstacles and receive their knowledge and rewards.

In this quest, four players will explore, get familiar and play with the multifaceted archetypes of the Tarot. From the character creation to the storyline, it will all be defined by pulling cards...

The Fool's Quest is a take on tabletop role-play games (Dungeon & Dragon, Dungeon World...) where the Tarot is the real game master.

This game is expanding on the spell writing workshop hosted this Winter Meeting at PAF by Franz and is part of the development of this own Tarot deck.

The Fool's Quest is still in development and we are excited to test the game with you.

Refraining from the future is a three-day workshop instrumentalizing sound to think through and practice different notions of time. Working with recording, voicing, looping and listening, we seek to find sonic expressions for time as a site of struggle–mediated by conflicts between scientific epistemologies, technical infrastructures, capital interests, social movements and the uneven complexity of lived time. We want to collectively and critically engage with temporal structures as mechanisms of worldmaking. Through reading, role-play, and sound improvisation, we seek to unravel the ways in which modes of timekeeping make and unmake worlds. Resisting to be drawn into a  linear progression towards a fetishized future, we propose to make systematic domination audible through changing rhythms, durations, harmonics, and breaks, the violence of vibration and the politics of frequency. Can these expressions ripple out as ways of embodying time otherwise? And what refrains may emerge from our bodies between, before, and beyond discrete moments of time?

“All touching entails an infinite alterity, so that touching the other is touching all others,including the ‘self,’ and touching the ‘self’ entails touching the strangers within.” - karen barad

In this workshop we will apply touch as a method towards the pursuit of disorientation. We will play with the dimensions of weight, texture, tone, intention, force, and the imaginary as we search for edges in which self and other, sender and receiver, become blurred. In safely loosening the grip of self-control, we will make space for generative encounters with alterity.

"Moving Thinking" proposes reading and studying as well as exercises and activities to enliven and embody the work of reading/imagining together. We will work with texts from Caribbean thinkers and others as we sort out where we sit and stand. How does intimacy in the space of study shape our collective imagination(s)?

“Gesture constitutes any particular body’s expressive movement and stance in relation to a receiver or a material. In this sense the imagination is transmitted, alive in the space between us, rather than individually possessed… [it] is expressive and social, as well as deeply intimate” (Lisa Robertson. “A Rubric.” In Simone Fattal: Finding a Way. (Exhibition catalogue), Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2021, 49).

A workshop exploring psychogeography and embodied transmissions alongside amateur broadcast and sonic theory. We will explore the spatiotemporal context of PAF and the surrounding landscape, building a framework of sonic reference to broadcast.

Psychogeography and Transmissions- a sound walk and audio collage.

Session 1: The histories of PAF through sound + A sound walk and collage creationSession

2: Broadcast performance

We'll look at current discourses on the non-human, the more than human and trans-humanism and how these categories differ as well as the implications of the articulating of these categories. We will also share our practices interacting and collaborating with the non-human. We will also share practices interacting and collaborating with the non-human.

A black and white analog photography workshop, from start to finish : taking a photo on an analog camera with black and white film, developing the negative film yourself, and then making a print in the darkroom on an enlarger and developing it.

Trans-Formations is an attempt to articulate an account of trans-subjectivity and its implications for radical performance, which is to say, radical political action. How is “trans” formed? Is it a form? How does it transform our patriarchal actuality?

This articulation will be philosophical, though its mode of presentation will not always be such. This is an attempt to draw an ethnography that is indistinguishable from its philosophical moments, drawing attention to the points of resistance to, and of, interpretation.

Moving between lecture, discussion and performance, we will advance lines of thought from Fred Moten, SOPHIE, D’Arcy Thompson, and Adorno, mapping modes of trans resistance in the present.

In this session we will be engaging in a series of exercises and prompts for reflecting on protocols of consent within movement practices and drawing a bridge with protocols of consent in web environments.

A performative lecture + screening.

Using humor, cynicism, spoken words, dance, and singing, Julie Grosche’s most recent film Eclipsed is about the invisible labor, pain, and transformation that motherhood provokes in women. Taken from a memoir the artist wrote about being an artist and a mother, 7 texts are interpreted in different situations by different actresses, turning it into a fictional documentary.

Inspired by the video, Julie Grosche and Aurélia Defrance will deliver a performative (maybe participatory) lecture about parenthood and art, followed by the screening of Eclipsed. Bring a towel to lay on.

It is said that the Tarot is a book left unbound, for everyone to write their own story.

Each card is a page, a lesson, a piece of wisdom.

This is an invitation to adventure in the pages of the Tarot.Like the Fool, you'll be journeying through the Major Arcanas, facing their trials, overcoming their obstacles and receive their knowledge and rewards.

In this quest, four players will explore, get familiar and play with the multifaceted archetypes of the Tarot. From the character creation to the storyline, it will all be defined by pulling cards...

The Fool's Quest is a take on tabletop role-play games (Dungeon & Dragon, Dungeon World...) where the Tarot is the real game master.

This game is expanding on the spell writing workshop hosted this Winter Meeting at PAF by Franz and is part of the development of this own Tarot deck.

The Fool's Quest is still in development and we are excited to test the game with you.

A workshop of experimental writing processes, where we use spells, rituals and shape shifting as tools for writing. We examine and try out historical examples and create new ones together.

A workshop exploring psychogeography and embodied transmissions alongside amateur broadcast and sonic theory. We will explore the spatiotemporal context of PAF and the surrounding landscape, building a framework of sonic reference to broadcast.

Psychogeography and Transmissions- a sound walk and audio collage.

Session 1: The histories of PAF through sound + A sound walk and collage creationSession

2: Broadcast performance

An introduction to the origins of the stars, under the night sky.

Two day workshop with multiple lectures on writing and constraint. Lecture by Tessel on Kathy Acker and formal logic exercises.

The workshop’s title comes from an inscription by Kathy Acker on the final page of “a”, Andy Warhol’s allegedly-unreadable 1968 novel; a book whose title already reduces the economy of meaning-making to the promiscuous relationship between single letters. Acker’s equation mark forces a correspondence. As the glyph posits a formal relationship between its two elements, it lets slip a bracketed excess “(oh)”. How then to deal with this (oh)?

A workshop about the sticky relationship between constraint, pleasure and language.

Marbles and unfurling treasure maps roll easily. But they aren’t people on skateboards.  

This workshop is an invitation to sample skateboarding. We will try out the basics: working out what stance we are (‘regular’ or ‘goofy’), learning how to balance on a board standing still, tictacking, and pushing and stepping on. We might also try carve-turns, kick-turns, and popping ollies, or tail-stalling on a curb-height obstacle.    

The workshop will assume that taking being good at skateboarding too seriously is a bad idea. If it’s all about the type of enjoyment that comes with intensely focusing on controlling something that wants to roll out of control, then even the simplest moves can be ‘steezy’ = done with style!

It is said that the Tarot is a book left unbound, for everyone to write their own story.

Each card is a page, a lesson, a piece of wisdom.

This is an invitation to adventure in the pages of the Tarot.Like the Fool, you'll be journeying through the Major Arcanas, facing their trials, overcoming their obstacles and receive their knowledge and rewards.

In this quest, four players will explore, get familiar and play with the multifaceted archetypes of the Tarot. From the character creation to the storyline, it will all be defined by pulling cards...

The Fool's Quest is a take on tabletop role-play games (Dungeon & Dragon, Dungeon World...) where the Tarot is the real game master.

This game is expanding on the spell writing workshop hosted this Winter Meeting at PAF by Franz and is part of the development of this own Tarot deck.

The Fool's Quest is still in development and we are excited to test the game with you.

Refraining from the future is a three-day workshop instrumentalizing sound to think through and practice different notions of time. Working with recording, voicing, looping and listening, we seek to find sonic expressions for time as a site of struggle–mediated by conflicts between scientific epistemologies, technical infrastructures, capital interests, social movements and the uneven complexity of lived time. We want to collectively and critically engage with temporal structures as mechanisms of worldmaking. Through reading, role-play, and sound improvisation, we seek to unravel the ways in which modes of timekeeping make and unmake worlds. Resisting to be drawn into a  linear progression towards a fetishized future, we propose to make systematic domination audible through changing rhythms, durations, harmonics, and breaks, the violence of vibration and the politics of frequency. Can these expressions ripple out as ways of embodying time otherwise? And what refrains may emerge from our bodies between, before, and beyond discrete moments of time?

A workshop of experimental writing processes, where we use spells, rituals and shape shifting as tools for writing. We examine and try out historical examples and create new ones together.

In 2017, I gave a Fantasmical Anatomies lesson called The Far Away Version, in which I addressed the bodies of the participants in an art gallery in Copenhagen from my hotel room in Phnom Penh.

‍‍I imagine you, there. What does it change if I am here with you or far away?

Language is a phantom limb. The voice is an avatar that travels without our bodies. Fantasmical Anatomies are corps fantasmés, concrete as pieces of bone.

‍Personal notes. Anne Juren, 2017.

We will show three films made by or with teenagers and children. These are films that we watched as part of our research for a teen film club at the self-organised art space Cittipunkt e.v., Berlin. The three films have different approaches to thinking about systems of filmmaking, groups and society. The screening will be followed by a discussion on radical education and anti-authoritarian pedagogy.

How might filmmaking be used in education, and to what ends? What insights might it provide about power-relations between teenagers and adults? How do we define the "pedagogue," and what is their function within this space? Can self-organisation be taught?

(Open for all ages)

Competition holds a deeply emotional tenor cultivated through shared narratives of champions, losers, underdogs, and what is deemed ‘fair’. This workshop will research oppositional and cooperative play structures such as evasion and pursuit, zero sum, scaffolded decision making, and systems of elimination. Drawing on frameworks of oppositional and cooperative play, participants will then consider the poetic and metaphoric possibilities of various game scenarios that emerge within their own game designs. Of particular interest will be how these games account for specific pairings of competitors and how spectacles of skill, fairness, or intimacy can be manipulated by the rules of play.

Two day workshop with multiple lectures on writing and constraint.
Lecture by Tessel on Kathy Acker and formal logic exercises.

The workshop’s title comes from an inscription by Kathy Acker on the final page of “a”, Andy Warhol’s allegedly-unreadable 1968 novel; a book whose title already reduces the economy of meaning-making to the promiscuous relationship between single letters. Acker’s equation mark forces a correspondence. As the glyph posits a formal relationship between its two elements, it lets slip a bracketed excess “(oh)”. How then to deal with this (oh)?

A workshop about the sticky relationship between constraint, pleasure and language."

Marbles and unfurling treasure maps roll easily. But they aren’t people on skateboards. 

This workshop is an invitation to sample skateboarding. We will try out the basics: working out what stance we are (‘regular’ or ‘goofy’), learning how to balance on a board standing still, tictacking, and pushing and stepping on. We might also try carve-turns, kick-turns, and popping ollies, or tail-stalling on a curb-height obstacle.

The workshop will assume that taking being good at skateboarding too seriously is a bad idea. If it’s all about the type of enjoyment that comes with intensely focusing on controlling something that wants to roll out of control, then even the simplest moves can be ‘steezy’ = done with style!

Coming soon...

A workshop of experimental writing processes, where we use spells, rituals and shape shifting as tools for writing. We examine and try out historical examples and create new ones together.

In Flann O’Brian’s “Third Policeman” one persona develops the “atomic theory,” whereby everything that touches something else exchanges atoms, and because of this, slowly, exchanges characteristics as well. Bicycles rub off on their owners. Trees become like tree huggers, and tree huggers like trees.  

This session is based on a series of instructions and scored concepts for physical self-performances in and around architectural objects that I have developed over the last 10 years for various sites and occasions. We will reflect on the idea of interactive guidance, as well as the intro-active momentum where works lose control of outcome and impact—in a conversation, but also by self-performing.

'You can perform the pieces in any order, but do them all for best results. Don't be put off by the historical references. It is all about you and your actual experience. If you enjoy this, do it twice.'

(from: Scores for the Body, the Building & the Soul, 2013 - 2023 by D.H.)

The session would concentrate on this project.

"Moving Thinking" proposes reading and studying as well as exercises and activities to enliven and embody the work of reading/imagining together. We will work with texts from Caribbean thinkers and others as we sort out where we sit and stand. How does intimacy in the space of study shape our collective imagination(s)?

“Gesture constitutes any particular body’s expressive movement and stance in relation to a receiver or a material. In this sense the imagination is transmitted, alive in the space between us, rather than individually possessed… [it] is expressive and social, as well as deeply intimate” (Lisa Robertson. “A Rubric.” In Simone Fattal: Finding a Way. (Exhibition catalogue), Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2021, 49).

We will show three films made by or with teenagers and children. These are films that we watched as part of our research for a teen film club at the self-organised art space Cittipunkt e.v., Berlin. The three films have different approaches to thinking about systems of filmmaking, groups and society. The screening will be followed by a discussion on radical education and anti-authoritarian pedagogy.

How might filmmaking be used in education, and to what ends? What insights might it provide about power-relations between teenagers and adults? How do we define the "pedagogue," and what is their function within this space? Can self-organisation be taught?

(Open for all ages)

The closing of a series of events organized by Selwa Sweidan & Nina Sarnelle (Touch Praxis) with many other contributors, exploring touch as a time-based medium and a system of co-creating knowledge. Attendees may drop in for a single session on any day, but are encouraged to attend all the events in order to work on touch performance together.

For a complete list of related events, visit this document.

For more about the prior work of Touch Praxis see this pdf.

Aug 8-11: different facilitators present workshops related to their individual practice, followed by a session of less-structured time for attendees to respond creatively through touch. Over the course of these 4 days, participants will be encouraged to try out ideas for touch performance together.

Aug 12:  participants have the option of presenting their touch performance experiments for the rest of the Summer University community.

In this workshop, the Strange Bedfellowship will lead a discussion about diverse practices of radical dreaming. The world-destroying system of colonial racial capitalism insists dreams are simply worthless brain noise or personal inspiration. Yet civilizations around the world and throughout history have found dreaming invaluable, especially when it can transcend individualism and become a collaborative practice. How can we acquaint ourselves with this potential?

Phanuel Antwi is a theorist and poet; Max Haiven is a writer and teacher; Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist; Together, they are the Strange Bedfellowship, a radical dreaming consultancy.

Corin Ward and Lyor Askénazi have been collaborating on mediation and accessibility matters as part of their sustained commitment to self-organisation at PAF.

The two sessions will explore the role of the mediator and centre around the sharing and developing of conceptual skills which enable mediation between multiple stories and realities in times of conflict or unease. Can we access or create a spacious dimension which allows for perceptions to shift, weaving back together fragmented realities to attempt a world where seemingly incompatible needs can coexist?

In nature, individuals often are limited by how their strength, size, or behavior performs against larger environments. However, collective behavior can enable communities to overcome huge challenges. For example, despite their tiny bodies, some insects like ants or termites can work together to perform impressive tasks like building complex nests or even taking over entire built environments constructed by others.

This workshop is designed as a swarming exercise for collective play, experimentation, and dreaming. The goal is to build a temporary home or nest through swarming behavior without verbal communication. Together we will remember how to swarm, embrace collectivity, and build together without spoken words.

I would like to invite you to consider with me how to complete a film trilogy that has remained unfinished for twenty years. The movie in question is called Washington, which was meant to conclude the story of Grace, the main character from the films Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005). Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, the movie was never completed.

During our sessions, we will analyze the two films that were made, as well as the documentation that was left behind about the intended plot of the final movie. We will also examine the sociopolitical context surrounding the films, both at the time of their creation and with regards to their subject matter.

Our goal is to finish the sessions with a draft of a movie treatment, which we will then share with other visitors to PAF.

Group-as-a-whole theory posits that when individuals form a group, the resulting union becomes an entity in its own right with a sum greater than its parts. We will apply both experiential and meta-analysis of our “groupness” together through embodied investigations, scores, and LARPing. We will focus on the “here and now“ as a lens through which to uncover underlying themes and dynamics of power, care, ambivalence, desire, etc. -- acknowledging that the content of the greater systems that we are embedded within can be traced through what is happening between us in the present. On the last day of the workshop we will generate scenic reenactments of earlier moments in the workshop as gestures towards reinterpretation and integration. Some practices may resemble something akin to group therapy, and while I am trained as a psychotherapist, this is not therapy. The intent is towards thickening community, intimacy, and experimentation.

A 45-min lecture with discussion. In the early days of astronomy and the observation of sunspots, a question emerged: if one could record the sun’s activities, could one forecast more local conditions, predict crop yields or other behaviors in the general economy? This speculation would inspire the usage of sunspots in economic theory, a term referring to an outside influence or anomaly within a market driven by fundamentals. Squinting, through the lens and practice of sunspot drawings, we will observe the volatility of speculative assets and other forces of instability. A discussion will follow to articulate how we might identify sunspots within a wide range of contemporary economic anxieties.

Sunspot Drawing Sessions will also be held in the garden throughout the week Aug 12-17.

For the first time, this summer, C, J & S bring you THE the talk show on two alienating concepts, Wom*n and The State.  Expect special guest experts in economics, political science and philosophy. Expect original music, special TV effects and much more…

This workshop will explore literary uses of metamorphoses, from Ovid to Sarah Ruhl, as catalysts for a post-human perspective in performance. Through a series of improvisational scores, we will investigate movement, object play, arrangement, and landscape compositions. By examining the body as both subject and object, we will seek to discover strategies for building a dramaturgy of transformation and exploring the possibilities of metamorphosing into something else.

Policing is constitutive of colonial modernity: normalising, internalising and legalising anti-black violence as the ongoing condition for white life and freedom. What has resulted is a situation where we cannot practically experience or even imagine worlds free from policing. From the plantation to the prison, global apartheid and pandemic control, these sessions will examine why and how policing has become the most ingrained and common-sense way of managing our world. I turn primarily to Barbados as the first Black slave society, as Hilary Beckles puts it, alongside a critical reading of Kant, Locke, and Hegel to consider how the world has been formed in the image of the police.

This workshop will introduce some of the key theoretical debates surrounding the relationship between Atlantic chattel slave production and capitalism. Was chattel slave production in the Atlantic plantation system capitalist? Did it become capitalist at some decisive moment? Was it a necessary condition of the transition to capitalism? What are the consequences of the various possible answers to these questions for contemporary anti-capitalist and abolitionist politics?

I would like to invite you to consider with me how to complete a film trilogy that has remained unfinished for twenty years. The movie in question is called Washington, which was meant to conclude the story of Grace, the main character from the films Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005). Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, the movie was never completed.

During our sessions, we will analyze the two films that were made, as well as the documentation that was left behind about the intended plot of the final movie. We will also examine the sociopolitical context surrounding the films, both at the time of their creation and with regards to their subject matter.

Our goal is to finish the sessions with a draft of a movie treatment, which we will then share with other visitors to PAF.

This two-part work session explores the differing fields of resonance in domestic space, interacting with them to see how they can reflect the sense of wavering levels of harmony that exists here. Through the work of Ragnar Kjartsson’s nine channel video installation, The Visitors, and readings from Barthes’ ‘How To Live Together’ and Koepnick’s ‘Resonant Matter: Sound Art and the Promise of Hospitality’, we will explore the overlapping and variously connectedness of sonic agents.

These often sound like drones; the home does not have a steady rhythm, things become loud and quiet, there are occasional beats, rumbles, shrieks, clanks and that leak across rooms. With listening devices, field recorders and sensors, connected to low power FM broadcast adapters we will then make a combined performance from throughout the building, with a shared broadcast bringing all of the frequencies together in (dis)harmony.

Group-as-a-whole theory posits that when individuals form a group, the resulting union becomes an entity in its own right with a sum greater than its parts. We will apply both experiential and meta-analysis of our “groupness” together through embodied investigations, scores, and LARPing. We will focus on the “here and now“ as a lens through which to uncover underlying themes and dynamics of power, care, ambivalence, desire, etc. -- acknowledging that the content of the greater systems that we are embedded within can be traced through what is happening between us in the present. On the last day of the workshop we will generate scenic reenactments of earlier moments in the workshop as gestures towards reinterpretation and integration. Some practices may resemble something akin to group therapy, and while I am trained as a psychotherapist, this is not therapy. The intent is towards thickening community, intimacy, and experimentation.

For a moment we will delve into the research of movement material. Through imagination, we will create fictional characters who will be the heroes of current and simple human everyday life. What will they look like and what qualities should they have?

For the first time, this summer, C, J & S bring you THE the talk show on two alienating concepts, Wom*n and The State.  Expect special guest experts in economics, political science and philosophy. Expect original music, special TV effects and much more…

We need new and better origin myths.  We need a way out of the dark loops of production as already consumption identified in Anti-Oedipus. We need new myths to understand the human powers of abstraction that are burning up our own world. Join me in a workshop that retells the history of our world from the position of the non human potentialities of language. With a short story by Samuel Delany called the myth of old Venn as source material, we'll look at slavery, time and language.

Policing is constitutive of colonial modernity: normalising, internalising and legalising anti-black violence as the ongoing condition for white life and freedom. What has resulted is a situation where we cannot practically experience or even imagine worlds free from policing. From the plantation to the prison, global apartheid and pandemic control, these sessions will examine why and how policing has become the most ingrained and common-sense way of managing our world. I turn primarily to Barbados as the first Black slave society, as Hilary Beckles puts it, alongside a critical reading of Kant, Locke, and Hegel to consider how the world has been formed in the image of the police.

A multimedia dance piece examining the legend of the Broadway diva through the queer eyes of her fans. The work mourns, critiques, and celebrates the relic of the Broadway diva, modulating her in the process. Factor’s signature stark and sensual physicality and Andrew’s otherworldly video projections collage to present a fantasia in which the many faces of the diva are repeatedly cracked open. Combining dance, costume and video projection, this performance troubles cultural memory, producing a resonance of confusion and transcendence by hijacking and disrupting the stability often assigned to fixed, “official” notions of archival knowledge and institutional history.

Corin Ward and Lyor Askénazi have been collaborating on mediation and accessibility matters as part of their sustained commitment to self-organisation at PAF.

The two sessions will explore the role of the mediator and centre around the sharing and developing of conceptual skills which enable mediation between multiple stories and realities in times of conflict or unease. Can we access or create a spacious dimension which allows for perceptions to shift, weaving back together fragmented realities to attempt a world where seemingly incompatible needs can coexist?

Physarum polycephalum is an acellular slime mold famous for its blobby yellow appearance and uncanny abilities. It is engaged by artists and computer scientists in a number of activities that involve creating networks, solving mazes, simulating migration and colonization processes and operating computers. During the workshop we will invent our own Physarum experiments that will allow us to reflect on the process of experimentation itself. The aim is to invent nondualistic, nonhierarchical and antipatriarchal experimental procedures.

The workshop will run in 3 sessions on 3 consecutive days:

1. Introduction of Physarum polycephalum and collective invention of a slime mold waking ritual
‍
2. Inventing slime mold experiments
‍
3. Discussing results

Plant life and seasonality seem to offer a level of certainty and comfort in shifting chaotic times. In this session, we will connect with an ecological rhythm through a forest walk and audio foraging (field recording?) trip of the PAF gardens and surroundings, testing ideas around the psychological benefits of being around plants, and in particular plants with medicinal properties. Then, by articulating and attempting to translate or communicate on behalf of the trees and plants and all the issues that we face in the form of love letters, using human language and sound, will allow us to think about being entangled in a community of people, plants and place and the reciprocity of those relationships.

The essential premise of this presentation is that existing theories of power are less concerned with the ontology of power than with the uses of power. The standard definition of power from e.g. international relations textbooks, “the ability to make others do what one wants them to do” is a case in point. This definition is essentially a description of one possible use of power but not of what power as a concept is and how it is understood as a cognitive concept. How we conceptualise power has consequences for how we respond to and address it. My ultimate aim here is to reconcile uses of the term in ways that may have implications for structural analyses and political activism.

based on the areas we'll be walking through, we'll choose a secret spot and a meeting time to offer and taste these potions to the rest of the PAFerz. To get there, we'll organize a treasure hunt starting from PAF, using clues and cryptomessages hidden along the way.

We need new and better origin myths. We need a way out of the dark loops of production as already consumption identified in Anti-Oedipus. We need new myths to understand the human powers of abstraction that are burning up our own world. Join me in a workshop that retells the history of our world from the position of the non human potentialities of language. With a short story by Samuel Delany called the myth of old Venn as source material, we'll look at slavery, time and language.

Many of the tools humans have developed seem to require that their users be skilled with “algebra”: these include programming, probability/statistics, and “linear algebra” (the system underpinning AI, physics, animation, and video games).

This has been to the neglect of visualization and embodiment, even though they are fundamental to how we absorb and consider information.

This presentation will use **no algebra**; instead, puzzles and pictures will let us understand “Prediction Markets” and “Geometric Algebra”.

Both of these will be vitally important tools for community decision-making and creativity over the next century; both are “mathematical”; neither are really about algebra.

A workshop using improvisatory movement-based tasks and experimental visual projections to explore liveness and virtuality, memory and myth.

Participants will: choose an iconic historical figure that is influential to their thinking, art practice, or whom they admire; select images or video clips of this person as source material; contribute prompts for generation of AI animated content; inhabit this character and interact with virtual projected environments they have generated.

Please wear clothing that is comfortable and come ready to move!

Physarum polycephalum is an acellular slime mold famous for its blobby yellow appearance and uncanny abilities. It is engaged by artists and computer scientists in a number of activities that involve creating networks, solving mazes, simulating migration and colonization processes and operating computers. During the workshop we will invent our own Physarum experiments that will allow us to reflect on the process of experimentation itself. The aim is to invent nondualistic, nonhierarchical and antipatriarchal experimental procedures.

The workshop will run in 3 sessions on 3 consecutive days:

1. Introduction of Physarum polycephalum and collective invention of a slime mold waking ritual
‍
2. Inventing slime mold experiments
‍
3. Discussing results

This two-part work session explores the differing fields of resonance in domestic space, interacting with them to see how they can reflect the sense of wavering levels of harmony that exists here. Through the work of Ragnar Kjartsson’s nine channel video installation, The Visitors, and readings from Barthes’ ‘How To Live Together’ and Koepnick’s ‘Resonant Matter: Sound Art and the Promise ofHospitality’, we will explore the overlapping and variously connectedness of sonic agents.

These often sound like drones; the home does not have a steady rhythm, things become loud and quiet, there are occasional beats, rumbles, shrieks, clanks and that leak across rooms. With listening devices, field recorders and sensors, connected to low power FM broadcast adapters we will then make a combined performance from throughout the building, with a shared broadcast bringing all of the frequencies together in (dis)harmony.

RED is an ongoing research project by Anu Laiho. RED investigates the idea of the self under the gaze of the other: how an artist is interpreted on stage by the audience or how our identities are perceived by others in everyday life - - the project is also informed by the queer experience, gender identities and the feminine figure in the society.

The intervention will consist of two parts. The first one will be a showing of underneath my skin there is red (2022), discussed in connection to Females by Andrea Long Chu, the concept of gender and perceived identities. The second part will be a showing of Selfportrait Pornography (2023), discussed in relation to Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell and how one presents and perceives one’s own identity. The research is continuously developing and welcomes input from whoever attends – It is a suggestion of entrances into the topics at hand.

while we'll go for a walk around PAF, we'll pick some edible plants with which we can make potions to drink with beneficial, healing, energizing virtues... Knowledge sharing, botanical books and hybrid recipes.

Over two days we propose to hold a space for reading and discussing elements of Ernst Kantorowicz’s 1957 text The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology.

If the group does not end up adopting the form of a Quaker meeting then it might well be oriented around the following concerns in chapter six, “On Continuity and Corporations”:    

1. The influence that the revelation of the Aristotelian idea of “the uncreatedness and infinite continuity of the world” had on the thinking of time in the twilight of the Medieval period, and beyond…    

2. The status and afterlife of Pope Innocent IV’s so-called “fiction theory”    

3. (in)corporations after Saint Paul

We would like to add that most of us are approaching this text for the first time, so please don’t expect authoritative guidance.

If anyone wants to register an especial interest in advance, to the point of perhaps even sharing in convening, then by all means get in touch with Will: wlspendlove@gmail.com

Frantz Fanon is best known today for his revolutionary decolonial writings. Yet, Fanon was also part of a radical psychotherapeutic movement, Institutional Psychotherapy, which sought to radically refigure institutions (like “asylums”) through a process of creating transversal connections between daily institutional practices and their surrounding social and political milieus. Using Fanon’s psychiatric writings as prompts, we will stage a series of collective discussions and embodied experiential exercises to critically reflect on what value (if any) Fanon’s institutional work may still hold for current efforts to challenge the dimensions of coloniality, ableism, and inaccessibility that still pervade so many of our institutional structures—including education, care, disability, and mental health support systems—today.

Philosopher-kings are dead, long live philosophy.

This three-day workshop, part of a broader project of building a contemporary An-akademia, aims at presenting and experimenting around various ways in which Platonic insights might be initiated at the point in time called the Now. Three axes will be explored, first around the notion of a real mathematics of nature, of ideality of forms within matter, leading up to the recursive planetary identity called the Earth-System; secondly, the music of the spheres, focused on the ontologically transversal nature of music as universal binding element of thinking, feeling and being; thirdly an exercise in dialectics with being and the one.

For a moment we will delve into the research of movement material. Through imagination, we will create fictional characters who will be the heroes of current and simple human everyday life. What will they look like and what qualities should they have?

An experiential Pen&Paper game, Spit City is played with pen, paper, and dice. The ruleset is inclusive of queer trans*feminist and crip perspectives. It invites players to world a geography and their own in-game identity. The possibility of one collective identity with several players is encouraged. The only physical remnant of a playthrough is a sketched map, which captures the players’ decisions on what is traced and how it is recorded. The process assimilates the approach of feminist cartography, which is multidimensional, multiscalar, and anchored in the body. Spit City facilitates the emergence of a queer pleasure-positive ecology, other-than-human intimacies, and a carnal role play experience for 2 to 7 players.

Elio J Carranza's work extends between experimental moving images, games, and sculpture. In their practice, they apply material technologies, collective fiction storytelling, and image production software for the purpose of developing (play) ecologies that visualize and complexify other-than-human and queer dissident intimacies.

Physarum polycephalum is an acellular slime mold famous for its blobby yellow appearance and uncanny abilities. It is engaged by artists and computer scientists in a number of activities that involve creating networks, solving mazes, simulating migration and colonization processes and operating computers. During the workshop we will invent our own Physarum experiments that will allow us to reflect on the process of experimentation itself. The aim is to invent nondualistic, nonhierarchical and antipatriarchal experimental procedures.

The workshop will run in 3 sessions on 3 consecutive days:

1. Introduction of Physarum polycephalum and collective invention of a slime mold waking ritual
‍
2. Inventing slime mold experiments
‍
3. Discussing results

Group improvisations based around breath, voice and sound.

This workshop is aimed at those who would like to use their voices more but are not sure how, or who are curious about the healing potential that certain frequencies, rhythmic loops & embodied listening can have. We will base the workshop on some exercises and scores by Kim Gardner, Pauline Oliveros and John Stevens. The idea is not to produce aesthetically pleasing sounds but rather to let sound produce us and see what happens in this process. An extra activity could be going for a silent walk in the forest.

Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies is an ongoing transdisciplinary artistic research, encompassing the spectrum of experiences and practices I have developed as a choreographer, dancer and soma- practitioner. By drawing on various fields of knowledge – anatomy, psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theories, poetry and somatic practices – the research expands choreography towards disparate discourses, practices and treatments of the body. At the intersection of the therapeutic and the choreographic, the somatic and the poetic, I have developed several body-orientated practices based on Feldenkrais’ speculative use of language, imagination and touch. Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies is a video essay made for a research seminar presented in May 2018. It represents different aspects of the studies in forms of practice-based situations that remain more enigmatic than explanatory.

RED is an ongoing research project by Anu Laiho. RED investigates the idea of the self under the gaze of the other: how an artist is interpreted on stage by the audience or how our identities are perceived by others in everyday life - - the project is also informed by the queer experience, gender identities and the feminine figure in the society.

The intervention will consist of two parts. The first one will be a showing of underneath my skin there is red (2022), discussed in connection to Females by Andrea Long Chu, the concept of gender and perceived identities. The second part will be a showing of Selfportrait Pornography (2023), discussed in relation to Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell and how one presents and perceives one’s own identity. The research is continuously developing and welcomes input from whoever attends – It is a suggestion of entrances into the topics at hand.

Over two days we propose to hold a space for reading and discussing elements of Ernst Kantorowicz’s 1957 text The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology.

If the group does not end up adopting the form of a Quaker meeting then it might well be oriented around the following concerns in chapter six, “On Continuity and Corporations”:    

1. The influence that the revelation of the Aristotelian idea of “the uncreatedness and infinite continuity of the world” had on the thinking of time in the twilight of the Medieval period, and beyond…    

2. The status and afterlife of Pope Innocent IV’s so-called “fiction theory”    

3. (in)corporations after Saint Paul

We would like to add that most of us are approaching this text for the first time, so please don’t expect authoritative guidance.

If anyone wants to register an especial interest in advance, to the point of perhaps even sharing in convening, then by all means get in touch with Will: wlspendlove@gmail.com

Frantz Fanon is best known today for his revolutionary decolonial writings. Yet, Fanon was also part of a radical psychotherapeutic movement, Institutional Psychotherapy, which sought to radically refigure institutions (like “asylums”) through a process of creating transversal connections between daily institutional practices and their surrounding social and political milieus. Using Fanon’s psychiatric writings as prompts, we will stage a series of collective discussions and embodied experiential exercises to critically reflect on what value (if any) Fanon’s institutional work may still hold for current efforts to challenge the dimensions of coloniality, ableism, and inaccessibility that still pervade so many of our institutional structures—including education, care, disability, and mental health support systems—today.

Philosopher-kings are dead, long live philosophy.

This three-day workshop, part of a broader project of building a contemporary An-akademia, aims at presenting and experimenting around various ways in which Platonic insights might be initiated at the point in time called the Now. Three axes will be explored, first around the notion of a real mathematics of nature, of ideality of forms within matter, leading up to the recursive planetary identity called the Earth-System ; secondly, the music of the spheres, focused on the ontologically transversal nature of music as universal binding element of thinking, feeling and being, thirdly an exercise in dialectics with being and the one.

This session will look at the forms that administration assumes. We will identify the way these forms allow for the flow, amplification, and depression of power. We begin from the standpoint that, far from benign modes of organization and efficiency, administration is an occluded and targeted form of state violence asymmetrically directed at vulnerable people. We will then move on to questions of organisational struggle, exploring the extent to which administration can be turned into a tool for emancipatory political practice.

Three films, each three minutes long, three home-made musical soundtracks. A lot of green. These are the questions: What does it mean to be two artists who move from the big city to the relatively remote countryside in another country? What does it mean for two artists to suddenly become shopkeepers? To learn French? What does it mean for an artist to suddenly become a parent? How to keep a child entertained? How to adjust to this weather? How to keep making art under the circumstances?

An experiential Pen&Paper game, Spit City is played with pen, paper, and dice. The ruleset is inclusive of queer trans*feminist and crip perspectives. It invites players to world a geography and their own in-game identity. The possibility of one collective identity with several players is encouraged. The only physical remnant of a playthrough is a sketched map, which captures the players’ decisions on what is traced and how it is recorded. The process assimilates the approach of feminist cartography, which is multidimensional, multiscalar, and anchored in the body. Spit City facilitates the emergence of a queer pleasure-positive ecology, other-than-human intimacies, and a carnal role play experience for 2 to 7 players.

Elio J Carranza's work extends between experimental moving images, games, and sculpture. In their practice, they apply material technologies, collective fiction storytelling, and image production software for the purpose of developing (play) ecologies that visualize and complexify other-than-human and queer dissident intimacies.

Group improvisations based around breath, voice and sound.

This workshop is aimed at those who would like to use their voices more but are not sure how, or who are curious about the healing potential that certain frequencies, rhythmic loops & embodied listening can have. We will base the workshop on some exercises and scores by Kim Gardner, Pauline Oliveros and John Stevens. The idea is not to produce aesthetically pleasing sounds but rather to let sound produce us and see what happens in this process. An extra activity could be going for a silent walk in the forest.

This seminar seeks to challenge the prevailing philosophy of history and propose a philosophy of geography as an alternative framework.

The discussion will examine the theoretical and practical implications of this shift in thinking, particularly in the context of global capitalism and global warming. Rather than focusing on the discipline of geography or using geographical knowledge as a basis, the proposed philosophy of geography sees space as a central analytical category and recognizes the earth as a metaphysical ground.

The seminar aims to engage a dialogue on the potential of this approach to contribute to contemporary debates. References may include but are not limited to Dipesh Chakrabarty, David Harvey, Donna Haraway, Edmund Husserl, Bruno Latour, Henri Lefebvre, Andreas Malm, Achille Mbembe, Elizabeth Povinelli, Anna Tsing.

Two hundred years ago, the Romantic idea of poetic thought emerged in complex dialogue with the beginnings of a computational view of cognition. This seminar will work through a computational thread in the history of thought about poetic thought, from Baumgarten to Kant to Shelley to Sylvia Wynter and Adrian Piper to ideas inspired by modern AI.

A participatory cabaret in 2 parts, hosted & held together by Anastasia Hadjipapa-McCammon, Francesca Hawker, and Zachary Schoenhut. Each evening will feature a plethora of performances, including offerings from the audience. Instructions for how to sign up will follow.

How could quantum physics « land in the body »?
This is my starting point.
Undirectional confronts the body with an unthinkable reality.
I am trying to image a dance in which the classical description of movement is not possible.
I am trying to work against / above / around / away the classical description of movement.
What if it does not take place in space?
What if instant reality can not determine the following event?
What if trajectory is not the representation?
There is nothing to understand. Failing is thinking in the good direction.
I invite you to take part of the confusion and dance !

Philosopher-kings are dead, long live philosophy.

This three-day workshop, part of a broader project of building a contemporary An-akademia, aims at presenting and experimenting around various ways in which Platonic insights might be initiated at the point in time called the Now. Three axes will be explored, first around the notion of a real mathematics of nature, of ideality of forms within matter, leading up to the recursive planetary identity called the Earth-System ; secondly, the music of the spheres, focused on the ontologically transversal nature of music as universal binding element of thinking, feeling and being, thirdly an exercise in dialectics with being and the one.

A collaborative in-progress installation. It sounds like a muddied, choral synthetic voice coming out of a circular hole* made in the middle of a circular grown fleshy, juicy, beige, smelly microbial slab. The hole raises high like a bottle neck. It sounds like the voices come from the base, on top of a lake of fermented tea, full at the bottom, oscillating and escaping up.

*held up by hands?

How can we perceive time differently through spiritual/sensorial encounters with ecological surroundings? Time has become the critical apparatus for extractive neo/colonial systems, replaced by the clock, forcing everything and everybody into fragmentary resources. This session attempts to collectively explore interrelatedness, codependency, always-healing-ness and resilience of geological time.

- Journey Table: Borrowing the American Indian tradition 'journey stick', the journey table collects the object of speculative memory of ecological loss. A group walk in the forest and garden with a simple prompt for a sharing session of the collected objects.  

- Sonic Tender: A nature walk intending to notice and record the healing substance of the sonic environment of nature. The sharing session threads and superimposes different sounds into a collective healing narrative.

- Awakening Geological Time: Responding to the compilation of the journey table and sound clips through body gestures and movements.

Scenario planning is a worldbuilding technique, a literary genre, a strategic analysis tool. It consists of writing quasi-fictional episodes—scenarios—about the future. Popular practices of futuring are haunted by binary models: either simulating different versions of the same dystopia or painting a frictionless fantasy defined by the absence of its opposite. This time is for exploring the possible futures of art education, for erasing and redrawing the border lines in the territories of knowledge production, beyond epistemic entrenchment.

In its fight against 'globalist' neoliberal order, one of the far right’s most successful rhetorical tools today is its seizing of postmodern, post-colonial, and even decolonial imaginaries. This workshop aims at exploring various dimensions of this strange reversal of conceptual fortunes, in order to sketch the political philosophy underlying it: first, with the pregnance of a futural imaginary of decoloniality within science-fiction; second, with Aleksandr Dugin’s mobilisation of ontological geo-politics inspired by Heidegger, Schmitt, and contemporary discussions around cosmotechnics ; third, with a reading Moishe Postone's work on antisemitism and anti-imperialism in its relationship to decolonial theory.

Taking cue from Carla Lonzi’s notion of ‘deculturalization’ (1970), this is an invitation to reflect on the moment right before something is conceptualized as art, and before someone is subjectivized into an individual, or refused to be so. By critically examining the abstractions that both emerge from and define our sensations in rigid forms of representation, we will approach what Amy De'Ath describes as “a form of experience beyond the concept.” (2017) This will bring us to questions such as: How is such experience grasped, and shared? What forms of relations and what practice does it entail, and negate, respectively?

A reading of excerpts from The Third Event by Jackqueline Frost followed by a discussion with Louis Morelle.

The Third Event is an on-going prose-poetic experiment that blends ethnographic essay, science fiction and lyric narrative. Set on the lost continent of Atlantis, an archeologist from the future encounters an Atlantean woman named Paouelle. Together they explore and invent conceptual processes such as “the Deep Water Horizon,” “Atlanticity” and “the Third Event.” Traversed by the untimely temporality of catastrophe and dream, The Third Event ruminates on our desire for the human past, present and future. Parts 1-4 of the work have been published serially in English (Parts 1&2 also exist in French and Part 3 in Swedish). Part 5 is in progress

A participatory cabaret in 2 parts, hosted & held together by Anastasia Hadjipapa-McCammon, Francesca Hawker, and Zachary Schoenhut. Each evening will feature a plethora of performances, including offerings from the audience. Instructions for how to sign up will follow.

From Aug 24 until the end of Summer University, L Exp, a matchmaking service based in Berlin, will contribute its advances in designing experiential matchmaking mechanisms. Each match is an ephemeral, unique, and contested blend of technologies new and ancient that works to create a participatory, interactive, and immersive reality engaging on levels bodily and spiritual, affective and intellectual. L Exp is the manipulation of chance.

Our research and development division will be on site conducting studies and demoing forthcoming advances. You may be selected for special focus groups or to join participatory design capsules. Find us before we find you.

A performative workshop exploring the boundaries of non-performance through performance experiments, discussion, and reading.

In this research opening, the concept of non-performance is proposed as a way of thinking how we can maintain the conditions of a material as it enters into a performative context. How to keep the thing withdrawing? How to radically protect the irreducibility of materials towards extractions of meaning, use, identity, or outcomes of communicability? And what are the ethics of such a gesture? Towards this direction we peek over the cliffside to ask how can art can become a form of life in itself?

This opening comes out of conversation with Paz Rojo and her book “To Dance in the Age of No Future.” It’s influenced by collaborators Julia Rubies Subiros, Tilhenn Klapper, Jaime Llopis, those at The Artist Commons, and many many others, as well as work of Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey, Timothy Morton, Alfred Whitehead and ……

This session focuses on the synthetic or phantastic constitution of (auditory) perception and the significance of the concept of noise for cognition and computation. We will see how this concept has changed from classical formulations, through developments in mathematics, computing, and cognitive science.

This involves some discussion of the dispute between computationalist and dynamicist or ecological models of perception over the nature of representation. It also concerns phenomenology, moving towards a computational description of the subjective phenomenological perspective.

Ultimately I argue for the central importance of noise not only within a topological conception of cognition and computation, but also in the collective transcendental-empirical torsion of image schemata and the social interactive elaboration of freedom. Art and music clearly play an important role in this collective process, and I will try to show how the conceptual framework presented is fruitful for the analysis of the work of several contemporary musicians.

This workshop will consist of guided movement and interactive tasks to investigate the idea of dance as prophecy. What messages can dance submit and receive? How do we ‘read’ those messages? What do they mean to us?

Whilst we are surrounded by prediction - efforts to capture the future in order to extract the maximum value from the present - still prediction cannot prepare us for the overwhelming unknowability of what lies ahead. I propose dance-as-prophecy to open up other ways of forging connections from past to future; not necessarily predicting what will come true, but training us for a kind of truth-making as-yet unknown to us.

Departing from shared interests in dance and fashion related work, Thjerza Balaj and Camilla Lind will host a workshop where we come together to explore character building through costume and text::: ✬ relating to different sites at paf as birth- life- and dying spaces for our earthlings to become + writing / text-work ✬ crafting of exteriors, costume-making, styling ✬ video documentation + collaging (text, video, image++)

A workshop exploring the blurred lines between the human and the synthetic, the imagined and the real. Using voice as a base from which to experiment. Participants will be shown how to create site-specific reverbs/filters/resonances and apply this to their own recordings. Any space can be a sounding board - a large hall or trash can. The aim is to give new perspectives on ‘space’ through a sonic lens, using examples of process and material forming at PAF between Severin Black and Bianca Hlywa. The end result would be an imagined sound piece using real-world processing techniques.

Key words: processing, convolution reverb, diffusion techniques, acoustics, recording techniques, sine sweep, sonic architecture

How can we perceive time differently through spiritual/sensorial encounters with ecological surroundings? Time has become the critical apparatus for extractive neo/colonial systems, replaced by the clock, forcing everything and everybody into fragmentary resources. This session attempts to collectively explore interrelatedness, codependency, always-healing-ness and resilience of geological time.

- Journey Table: Borrowing the American Indian tradition 'journey stick', the journey table collects the object of speculative memory of ecological loss. A group walk in the forest and garden with a simple prompt for a sharing session of the collected objects.  

- Sonic Tender: A nature walk intending to notice and record the healing substance of the sonic environment of nature. The sharing session threads and superimposes different sounds into a collective healing narrative.

- Awakening Geological Time: Responding to the compilation of the journey table and sound clips through body gestures and movements.

Do you remember a time when your artistic skills saved you in a delicate situation?

How do you prove you are an artist to a border guard? How do you negotiate with a machine reluctant to approve your artist visa?  How do you design an automated system to discriminate between human and non human art?

Artistic skill is intuitively recognised across cultures and languages, but art education and art teaching curricula are not universal. This time is for learning how to draw by hand. For speculating on the forms of knowledge and the techniques that will resist automation. On what will be worth learning by heart.

In its fight against 'globalist' neoliberal order, one of the far right’s most successful rhetorical tools today is its seizing of postmodern, post-colonial, and even decolonial imaginaries. This workshop aims at exploring various dimensions of this strange reversal of conceptual fortunes, in order to sketch the political philosophy underlying it: first, with the pregnance of a futural imaginary of decoloniality within science-fiction; second, with Aleksandr Dugin’s mobilisation of ontological geo-politics inspired by Heidegger, Schmitt, and contemporary discussions around cosmotechnics ; third, with a reading Moishe Postone's work on antisemitism and anti-imperialism in its relationship to decolonial theory.

A trans-historical project tracing the Andromeda myth through social and cultural life. Working through different iterations of the story, our research will address this song cycle, with part of the project to develop a mode of collective singing. This workshop will focus on the songcycle, and on a collective composition/constellation, incorporating broadcast and transmission.

A performative workshop exploring the boundaries of non-performance through performance experiments, discussion, and reading.

In this research opening, the concept of non-performance is proposed as a way of thinking how we can maintain the conditions of a material as it enters into a performative context. How to keep the thing withdrawing? How to radically protect the irreducibility of materials towards extractions of meaning, use, identity, or outcomes of communicability? And what are the ethics of such a gesture? Towards this direction we peek over the cliffside to ask how can art can become a form of life in itself?

This opening comes out of conversation with Paz Rojo and her book “To Dance in the Age of No Future.” It’s influenced by collaborators Julia Rubies Subiros, Tilhenn Klapper, Jaime Llopis, those at The Artist Commons, and many many others, as well as work of Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey, Timothy Morton, Alfred Whitehead and ……

I will talk about the figure of William Morris (1834-1896) and his « Gothic Socialism », a form of revolutionary activism that used renewed interest in gothic architecture (especially the work of John Ruskin) to leverage a critic of the capitalist means of production, division of labour and obsession with growth — where the Cathedral would be seen as some sort of anti-factory and the dreams of past glories could be used as a reservoir of progressive ideas. This early alliance between marxism and ecology put the joy of labour at the heart of all revolutionary politics.

What occurs in the somatic landscape or sub-scape, subspace or subdermal. Sensing together, moving between the haptic, sonic and visceral. Moving away from a universalized concept of consent, and focusing on how individual sensory experience can generate bodily knowledge(s) to support the collective. We'll go deep into gravity, backspace, undulation and depth.

Working collectively to research an accessible practice-based framework around consent and agency. Using information and language from our own individual body-based intelligence(s). Beginning with the notion of sensing together in order to materialize and expand a culture of consent. We will unpack the relationship between consent and identity, or positionality.

How can we create environments that facilitate consent culture? What and how and where does consent live in systems of collectivized living? Can consent culture be generative?

What is the relationship between listening and writing? How to create "critical" work in which thinking does not derive its concepts from an exterior "verified knowledge" but from listening or embodied knowledge? How to bypass the usual jump-cut of relating phenomena to overarching systems (capitalism, climate change) and instead focus on ordinary and fragmented experiences of everyday life as an integral site of cultural politics? What if one doesn't only write ABOUT but WITH something and affirms its potential affective and utopian qualities?

Departing from shared interests in dance and fashion related work, Thjerza Balaj and Camilla Lind will host a workshop where we come together to explore character building through costume and text::: ✬ relating to different sites at paf as birth- life- and dying spaces for our earthlings to become + writing / text-work ✬ crafting of exteriors, costume-making, styling ✬ video documentation + collaging (text, video, image++)

Video screening. Agrilogistics looks at recent technological transformations in contemporary industrial agriculture. Tulip bulbs, chrysanthemum stems and vine tomatoes are processed through cameras, feeding datasets that regulate their own growth. During the day, the greenhouse is a cinematic device, an automated film set optimized for the mass production of fruits and flowers. At night, the factory stops: without an inside or an outside, the greenhouse becomes an oneiric chamber where plants, animals and machines form new entanglements.

Collapsology, the study of how societies fall apart, has often been a reactionary discipline. It is nevertheless an increasingly urgent one. In this session, we will discuss:

1. What societies are, such that their decomposition becomes comprehensible.
2. The question of how we locate ourselves and our societies in history.
3. The relationship between our political projects and 'catastrophic' understandings of history.
4. Strategies for 'smuggling' whatever it is that we believe to be valuable into the future.

"I am not real, I am just like you."
Sun Ra

Utopia: a suspended locale, a space without time, extracted from the mud. The canonical version of Utopia is a suspicious object of desire -dis-incarnated; bodies are designed, pacified, idealized. These constructs, made by the little boys playing king, are islands where time is suspended, where transformation is not welcome. A flat country. A healthy country. But the saying goes: tell me what kind of utopia you wrote, and I will tell you what diseases infest you.

What happens when we re-introduce time, when we betray Utopia’s intentions, when we let slime get in the cracks, when we corrupt the model and use putrefaction as a political tool? How far can we push it before it fails us again?

Betraying utopia is a gesture, and we will retrace this effort in the works of philosophers, dancers, movie makers, poets, landscapes and biomes from west african, middle-eastern, indian and asian countries. They offer us documents contributing to the construction of utopia asa technique, as a practical tool: to survive, to host, to haunt.

- our strategy is to use the double bind of haunting and hospitality to fragment utopia into smaller pieces and disseminate those fragments in our present practices.

Taking cue from Carla Lonzi’s notion of ‘deculturalization’ (1970), this is an invitation to reflect on the moment right before something is conceptualized as art, and before someone is subjectivized into an individual, or refused to be so. By critically examining the abstractions that both emerge from and define our sensations in rigid forms of representation, we will approach what Amy De'Ath describes as “a form of experience beyond the concept.” (2017) This will bring us to questions such as: How is such experience grasped, and shared? What forms of relations and what practice does it entail, and negate, respectively?

A trans-historical project tracing the Andromeda myth through social and cultural life. Working through different iterations of the story, our research will address this song cycle, with part of the project to develop a mode of collective singing. This workshop will focus on the songcycle, and on a collective composition/constellation, incorporating broadcast and transmission.

My contribution raises the question of specificity in relation to contemporary psychoanalysis. Specificity in this context cannot be reduced to stagnant definitions of psychoanalytic concepts. In relation to the psychoanalytic experience, specificity has to do with contingency and the constant re-articulation of concepts realised anew in relation to the logic from which they are drawn. Can we even speak of concepts when we try to articulate psychoanalytic theory in relation to a lived experience of psychoanalysis? I further propose that the question ‘What is a psychoanalyst?’, when posed logically and not ontologically, ruptures assumed psychoanalytic knowledge and perhaps allows something psychoanalytic to pass through mere theoretical debate.

What occurs in the somatic landscape or sub-scape, subspace or subdermal. Sensing together, moving between the haptic, sonic and visceral. Moving away from a universalized concept of consent, and focusing on how individual sensory experience can generate bodily knowledge(s) to support the collective. We'll go deep into gravity, backspace, undulation and depth.

Working collectively to research an accessible practice-based framework around consent and agency. Using information and language from our own individual body-based intelligence(s). Beginning with the notion of sensing together in order to materialize and expand a culture of consent. We will unpack the relationship between consent and identity, or positionality.

How can we create environments that facilitate consent culture? What and how and where does consent live in systems of collectivized living? Can consent culture be generative?

This lecture consists of a research which has been showed in both workshops with hands-on work and art therapy, but also as an artwork as a collective meditation session. For this I want to develop it into a lecture of how to approach art and the space within the art. How our need for reification, hidden structures on how to act, but also an awareness of what materials we have available – privilege and where we are placed in the world. The difference of objects and artworks and to avoid it’s becoming a commodity. It’s about separation, community, and process. This will be led to a presentation of an idea for an initiation ritual for intertwining the issues.

Train the self to be born of itself without help and outfit it to face death solely, however, if the nonplace does not consume you. You will become robust because you have used your utmost energies and inner range, not to be destroyed or to find some equality but to reconcile and outdo yourself and your losses.

The session is part of a pre-project, aiming to render the question of exile in a multifaceted experience as a destination, or as I call it,” a slimy poem about a thing that has many names and two faces.” based on  Mahmoud Darwish text ”About exile.” Eksil-Lanse drives deep inspiration from Jassem Hindi's question on “How to host what haunts us?” as a framework of possibilities of spatializing the poetic.

The second Cours universitaires de Davos (1929) was the setting for a historic confrontation between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. The lectures and seminars were attended by such brilliant students as Carnap, Cavaillès, Levinas, Leo Strauss... Although at first glance a scholastic dispute over the interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (and Cassirer's neo-Kantianism), the polemical exchange between the two towering figures of German philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s is said to have changed the face of philosophy by splitting it up into two cultures for the next century.

Authoritative philosophers of science (Michael Friedman) and intellectual historians (Peter Gordon) have argued that the notorious divide between the so-called "analytic" and "continental" schools originated there. Friedman, for example, argues in his A Parting of the Ways (2000) that in the tension triangle between Cassirer, Heidegger and in particular also Carnap, the bridge between logical-epistemological and metaphysical modes of philosophizing was blown up.

My purpose is to discuss this diagnosis.

How do cameras produce and reproduce power relations under Capitalism?
This 2-part program includes a screening of short works by contemporary artists and filmmakers, and a lecture and group discussion.

Together we will examine how advances in optics and image-making have long been entangled with power relations in Europe and around the world. By looking at the origins of modern image production technology alongside emergent forms of AI-powered machine vision, we will consider how cameras continue to be shaped by- and contribute to- imperial and capitalist ideological programs.

Between 1880 and 1920, the Dutch village of Laren became a gathering place for artists, writers, philosophers, theosophers, and anarchists. During the First World War, three figures whose work was decisive for the development of De Stijl settled among the disparate utopian communities: Piet Mondriaan, Bart van der Leck, and Theo van Doesburg. In this workshop, we will explicate a philosophical conception of abstraction in the works of De Stijl through an engagement with this milieu. We will consider (1) M.H.J. Schoenmaekers’ neoplastic philosophy of mathematics, (2) the ideas and diagrams produced by the local Theosophical Society, and (3) Mondriaan’s writings and paintings.

‘That everything cannot be established all at once has nothing to do with history, but is the characteristic of the intelligible.’

Beginning with this enunciation from Jean Cavaillès in 1942, I would like to try and sketch, from first principles, something like a history of the concept of logical time. First, we will move from Cavaillès to a constellation of uses of the term « temps logique » in post-war France (Lacan, Bachelard, Goldschmidt).

We will then trace, non-linearly, the conceptual antecedents to a thought of internal logical non-simultaneity, passing through, amongst other sites, classical rationalist treatises on method (Descartes, Spinoza), the formation of the modern concept of computability as procedures that terminate in finite time, and Neoplatonic discourses on the movement of the intellect.

Open Deck is an ongoing project and series of gatherings giving space to collectively listen, discuss and explore relationships to music and sound recordings. It operates under a ‘bring your own’ ethos to encourage an informal space for group listening and conversation.There will be a vinyl deck, mixer, aux cable & speaker setup - please bring a piece of music that you would like to share (either a vinyl record or digital file / youtube link is fine too, feel free to email me in advance).

The idea was developed from an interest in the ways memories and stories are carried through personal connections to music and a curiosity for what we can learn about value systems, histories and cultural traditions through the documentation, preservation, and dissemination of sound recordings in a group setting.

The the new recording studio at PAF makes progress and I would like to continue to explore it during the SU23.

A collective music making and recording process without a fixed preconception but a shared horizon of: POP + NEW MUSIC + FREE JAZZ. During a week we can experiment with the new equipment and the building as a sound device and continue to realize the PAF Dolls Arkestra.

A long term open combo project at PAF for music making-recording and conceptual thinking around sound as a practice between improvisation and composition. The PDA can change its form all the time and is open for everybody to join and leave at any time. PAF means here POPULAR-AVANTGARDE-FREE.

What occurs in the somatic landscape or sub-scape, subspace or subdermal. Sensing together, moving between the haptic, sonic and visceral. Moving away from a universalized concept of consent, and focusing on how individual sensory experience can generate bodily knowledge(s) to support the collective. We'll go deep into gravity, backspace, undulation and depth.

Working collectively to research an accessible practice-based framework around consent and agency. Using information and language from our own individual body-based intelligence(s). Beginning with the notion of sensing together in order to materialize and expand a culture of consent. We will unpack the relationship between consent and identity, or positionality.

How can we create environments that facilitate consent culture? What and how and where does consent live in systems of collectivized living? Can consent culture be generative?

Train the self to be born of itself without help and outfit it to face death solely, however, if the nonplace does not consume you. You will become robust because you have used your utmost energies and inner range, not to be destroyed or to find some equality but to reconcile and outdo yourself and your losses.

The session is part of a pre-project, aiming to render the question of exile in a multifaceted experience as a destination, or as I call it,” a slimy poem about a thing that has many names and two faces.” based on  Mahmoud Darwish text ”About exile.” Eksil-Lanse drives deep inspiration from Jassem Hindi's question on “How to host what haunts us?” as a framework of possibilities of spatializing the poetic.

The second Cours universitaires de Davos (1929) was the setting for a historic confrontation between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. The lectures and seminars were attended by such brilliant students as Carnap, Cavaillès, Levinas, Leo Strauss... Although at first glance a scholastic dispute over the interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (and Cassirer's neo-Kantianism), the polemical exchange between the two towering figures of German philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s is said to have changed the face of philosophy by splitting it up into two cultures for the next century.

Authoritative philosophers of science (Michael Friedman) and intellectual historians (Peter Gordon) have argued that the notorious divide between the so-called "analytic" and "continental" schools originated there. Friedman, for example, argues in his A Parting of the Ways (2000) that in the tension triangle between Cassirer, Heidegger and in particular also Carnap, the bridge between logical-epistemological and metaphysical modes of philosophizing was blown up.

My purpose is to discuss this diagnosis.

We will outline and test a speculative theory of pop song-form as generalized to a structural polarity between the I and the IV chord, a transcendental ‘meta-hinge’ structuring pop music’s tonal structure and harmonic form. By bracketing to some extent (to a greater extent than is usually done) other constitutive technological and socio-historical factors, we'll attempt to trace a nascent genealogy of pop song-form through composers like Satie, Bartók, Debussy, Messiaen, and others. The wager is that a new (perhaps only retroactively audible) structural duality emerges (yet one which has importantly existed across the world and in different historical European contexts) via late Romantic/early Modernist classical music’s rapprochement with various folk musics, that of a switch in polarity from the I and the V chord to the I and IV, opening up a new transcendental magnetism which has had a presiding if subterranean role in bending the collective ear towards, well, 'pop'.

‘That everything cannot be established all at once has nothing to do with history, but is the characteristic of the intelligible.’

Beginning with this enunciation from Jean Cavaillès in 1942, I would like to try and sketch, from first principles, something like a history of the concept of logical time. First, we will move from Cavaillès to a constellation of uses of the term « temps logique » in post-war France (Lacan, Bachelard, Goldschmidt).

We will then trace, non-linearly, the conceptual antecedents to a thought of internal logical non-simultaneity, passing through, amongst other sites, classical rationalist treatises on method (Descartes, Spinoza), the formation of the modern concept of computability as procedures that terminate in finite time, and Neoplatonic discourses on the movement of the intellect.

This session aims to give a sense of what situation agriculture is in and what opportunity regenerative agriculture has to influence extreme natural crises by focusing on the power of change that lies in our hands.

Things we might do:::
✼ plant something
✼ converse about farming

Imagine the house of a retired, reformed scarecrow who invites birds in, rather than scaring them away. By bringing a natural setting indoors, we will welcome in nature’s chaos: a creative reaction against our longstanding practice of driving wild animals off the land to domesticate, drain and manage it.

Get your hands dirty and considerately gather materials from the woodlands and gardens around PAF. With their findings, they will adorn various domestic items (a piano, a radio, a table, a chair…) in response to one of the given prompts (ornamental, functional, impractical…) and the output will be determined spontaneously by draping, smearing, scattering, strapping, filling…

The finished result will be a domestic setting as it would be inhabited by the reformed scarecrow. Everyone will be involved in filming the gathering, making and inhabitation of the set, which can then be screened in the open-air cinema one evening.

In 1920, while a law student in Paris, my great grand-uncle Pridi Banomyong, along with fellow Thai students and members of the military, formed the People's Party with the goal to transition Thailand from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. Fifteen years after the success of the 1932 Siamese Revolution, the People's Party was toppled by a military coup and Pridi was forced into exile, never to return to Thailand in his lifetime. He spent his final years in Anthony, a suburb of Paris.

After a decade in the US, I returned to Paris in the summer of 2022, looking for signs of Pridi amidst the familiar topography of the city. How might the built environment of Paris recognize its diasporic heros? How can Paris be a repository for a revolution that occurred 9,437 km away?

I know times are changing
It's time we all reach out
For something new, that means you too
You say you want a leader
But you can't seem to make up your mind
- Prince Rogers Nelson

On stage appears a purple landscape, a shared space for memories and sounds. “Where the fuck am I ?” is a duet that researches various expressions through voice and movement, entertainment and recovering the forgotten. The performers’ bodies are considered as satellites calling for the ‘ghosts’ of our lives, passing through and embodying collective and personal memories. The dance becomes a chaos of images, a collage of sonic references — channeling archives, both personal and pop cultural. Manifested as an incessant flow of representation that carries us away. A multi referential body is created with symbols and remains that cross us, build us, and weigh us down.

The Care Council is an experimental project that seeks to develop care practices and relationships that embrace radical re-interpretations of kinship. At its core, it asks:  How and what type of care practices can help us become kin in healthy, sustainable and liberatory ways? The project is conceived of as a methodology to accompany groups as they shape a common practice. It wishes to provide them with tools that can help them sustain and reproduce themselves collectively and individually while (creatively yet care-fully) exploring affective modes of relating as the basis of their shared practice. The project comprises a series of gatherings structured in three parts, namely 1) Bodywork, 2) Care-full Sharing and 3) Food (for Thought). Each gathering revolves around a specific topic and includes body/movement practices, writing, drawing or mapping exercises and readings or screenings.

The Care Council is a practice developed by Mouries Collective, which, At this time, is composed of Eliana Otta, Isabel Gutierrez Sanchez, Maria Juliana Byck, Sanem Su Avci, Thalia Dimitropoulou and Vasilikí Sifostratoudaki.'

Temporary communities can be more meaningful and powerful than communities that stay fixed and long enough to destroy its fundamentals. The interplay through gathering and dispersing can open a possibility for resistance against the ongoing production of modern violence. But what is violence? Can we describe violence rather than assume? Saidiya Hartman once said “Care is the antidote to violence”. Then again what is care work? The radical is also someone who needs care and healing and joy. For this gathering I will be sharing a video work, doing a reading as well as brewing Ethiopian coffee for group discussions and conversations, around topics such as care, violence, beauty, and community.

The critical project contains a gap made explicit by the circularity of Kant’s account of density in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Sciences, a gap that forces Kant to rethink the entirety of the critical project. The problem is that of the transcendental substratum taken as a dynamic continuum, which Kant terms ether among other names. Solving this through a transcendental deduction of ether produces a transition to a transcendental Spinozism, a transition that remains incomplete in Kant, whose numerous attempts at this transcendental deduction have remained largely unconvincing. This talk proposes a new transcendental deduction of ether.

How do cameras produce and reproduce power relations under Capitalism?

This 2-part program includes a screening of short works by contemporary artists and filmmakers, and a lecture and group discussion.

Together we will examine how advances in optics and image-making have long been entangled with power relations in Europe and around the world. By looking at the origins of modern image production technology alongside emergent forms of AI-powered machine vision, we will consider how cameras continue to be shaped by- and contribute to- imperial and capitalist ideological programs.

Imagine the house of a retired, reformed scarecrow who invites birds in, rather than scaring them away. By bringing a natural setting indoors, we will welcome in nature’s chaos: a creative reaction against our longstanding practice of driving wild animals off the land to domesticate, drain and manage it.

Get your hands dirty and considerately gather materials from the woodlands and gardens around PAF. With their findings, they will adorn various domestic items (a piano, a radio, a table, a chair…) in response to one of the given prompts (ornamental, functional, impractical…) and the output will be determined spontaneously by draping, smearing, scattering, strapping, filling…

The finished result will be a domestic setting as it would be inhabited by the reformed scarecrow. Everyone will be involved in filming the gathering, making and inhabitation of the set, which can then be screened in the open-air cinema one evening.

Have you ever imagined what would Descartes have said to Gorgias? Or what Frege would have thought about Deleuze’s deterritoralization? Or if Nietzsche would have loved Lewis’ concrete possible worlds? With this immersive theatrical experience you can witness that! This performance aims in presenting some philosophical discussions that have never taken place (and maybe you wish they did!).

Attendees will be provided with a deck of cards/list of philosophers’ names each written on an individual piece of paper. Two people at the time can pick one card/piece of paper each. I will then perform an imaginary philosophical discussion between these two figures. Attendees can stop the performer at any time suggesting different physical postures and contents.

What does it mean to know and how can this lead to transformation? We firstly consider dimensions of knowledge (connaître / savoir) as well as its embodied, situated and pluralistic nature before crossing to quantum social theory to explore the nature of matter and energy. Together we will consider how societal, personal and cellular levels interact to create change.

We will examine how we know and transmit knowledge, exploring the nature and textures of our bodily and energetic boundaries in small group exercises. Following this, we will engage in an extended individual exercise; each of us will go out and engage with another species or object, inquiring and sharing knowledge, curiously considering the entanglements that arise.

We will share insights from our encounters through social-presencing theatre and ethics of care, probing what we think we know about the dynamics of societal transformation processes.

Coming soon...

Fem queen’s lament is a research project developed during ATLAS Choreographic Training Programme. The work is a tribute to the African-American and Latinx trans women who gave rise to the ballroom category “vogue fem soft and cunt” in the 90's ballroom scene, which aims to bring about a deeper understanding of their personal histories and approaches to the category. Departing from the vocal body practice that Midtbø has articulated over the past few years, the project seeks out the transformative potential of a meter long wig, while examining the form and function of lamentations in different cultures.

An exploration of the concepts of god and infinity in light of the theory of the Big Bang, the rejection of this theory by Soviet physicists, and recent scientific and philosophical developments.

This talk will lay out a general theoretical approach to function, construction and social effects of fine arts taking a path of finding out what the potential of mechanization of creativity, aesthetics and artifice making was historically, is today, and whether there is a possible future to it.