Betraying Ambition

A philosopher’s path towards embodiment through Tai Chi and psychedelics.
This book proposes different forms of embodiment that are not necessarily leading to production of subjectivity or territorialized identities but rather putting the “self” at risk allowing us to be emancipated from the mandatory illusion of self-realization. This can be facilitated by a daily commitment with a set of body altering practices that disjoint us from the ordinary accustomed experience of reality and provide us access to “other” layers of the real. These practices grant access to the primary control centers of the body that regulate frequencies of energy and consciousness in a deeper way and enable the body to unfold in different dimensional spaces of experience: rendering sensible the multi-layered energetic body.

Chile Chico et le quartier Versailles, c'est une exploration qui inventorie, interroge et révèle les mémoires invisibles en listes et en collections. Une mémoire qui ne soffre pas en bloc, qui résiste, se fragmente, se transforme. A travers cette archive collaborative, nous avons voulu capter ces va-et-vient ď'un passé qui dialogue avec le présent, des images qui oscillent entre Vintime et le collectif. 

Le point de départ de cette fabrique visuelle, c'est lexil des Chilien.nes, débarqué.es dans les années 70, qui se tissent une nouvelle vie sur le sol de Neder-Over-Heembeek, dans le quartier Versailles à Bruxelles. Ces trajectoires, arrachées à un ailleurs, s'ancrent dans des espaces rêvés comme de transit pour devenir des lieux d 'appartenance, où lexil se mue et les racines finissent par se déployer. A ces récits se greffent d'autres histoires, d'autres trajectoires. Un quartier comme un carrefour, ou les individualités se rencontrent, où les vies se croisent et s'allient.

The Appendixes #1–4 is an editorial series by Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré and Victoria Pérez Royo that developed out of the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. For a two-year residency at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers* (2022–23), they came together as a small work group, shaping the work process, hosting presentation formats and making this publication series on paper as four cahiers.

The cahiers comprise a collection of commissioned texts and contributions created for this context, selected documents and traces from work sessions and encounters organized during their residency, texts read together and republished for this occasion, a collection of references, notes in progress, unfinished thoughts and loose fragments – on paper, between pages.

The Appendixes are organized around four themes: (1) The gesture of writing, (2) How to organize a library, (3) Orality and (4) Translation. In addition to being published on paper, the editorial series also consisted of other formats of presentations, exchanges and meetings organized as workshops, fieldwork, performances, conferences, collective readings and oral publications, taking place during their residency at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and in the vicinity.

Visit [country] is an artist’s book that brings together texts taken word for word from official government tourism websites and state-produced promotional videos from every UN-recognized country in the world. Stripped of the usual accompanying imagery and inspirational music, what becomes clear is how tourism feeds on — and is fuelled by — nationalism, chauvinism, and the invention of identity.

Much like a “choose your own adventure” book, the reader is guided by a series of questions that connect one country to another through recurring ideas and clichés, and must decide whether to visit the destination with “the best food”, “the most beautiful women”, “the friendliest people”, or “the most authentic history”. The book also includes an extensive concept index that maps the thematic and linguistic patterns linking the nations’ self-descriptions. It is a journey where every country is the best.

The project grows out of The Complete National Anthems of the World, a durational performance first presented in 2023, and stands as a parallel, autonomous, yet complementary work.

This book, Deux Ans de Vacances, Dos Años de Vacaciones, Dwa Lata Wakacji, Two years Vacation, Due Anni di Vacanza, documents the production of Céline Condorelli's process-based, cumulative artwork titled 'Tools for Imagination'. The title of the book raises the question of labour and working time, starting from a non-equivalence with its inverse: free time. We can read the various iterations of the title which appear on the cover as an expression of the impossibility of thinking about time outside of work in a univocal dimension.

sex and place is a series of workshops and publications exploring score-based and semi-anonymous writing as a tool for articulating shared concerns.

Vol. 1 ‘preliminiaries’ is written by Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen. In the midst of (learning) child care, (unlearning) performance and (experimenting with) sex, the publication interweaves three registers of writing as analogies and interruptions of each other.

The ‘sex and place’ series is part Domestic Anarchism, a project devoted to coalition-building beyond biological, chosen, or national conceptions of family. Dance serves as a set of tools and knowledge that can be applied beyond “the spectacle” to collectively study, write, and move. 

Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen are choreographers and they co-parent three-year-old Penélope Cleo. Andrea and Adriano use dance and choreography to think about the distribution of care and solidarity beyond ‘the family’, and in turn consider how such a distribution could inform their dance practice. Inevitably themes like sex, economy, gender, and class get activated. But also notions such as prefiguration, anarchism, clitoridian* thinking, zones of non-domination and coalition building. They see dance as a knowledge that can be applied to different practices. Some of these include: co-habitations, score based writing and dancing, self-organised study groups and publications, workshops and dance performances.