… Through Practices

‘Piles of Bricks / Piles de briques’ by Bie Michels presents the working proces of her project ‘Bricks in Madagascar’. This project consists of two films, ‘La couleur de la brique’ and ‘Ingahy Kama’, the installation ‘Circular construction versus human body—referring to Toshikatsu Endo’, which she showed in Madagascar (October 2017) and Argos Brussels (May 2018), and the performance ‘Piles of bricks (working process)’, on which she will work 8 weeks before the book presentation and which will be performed at that moment.

Besides images and stills, five writers deliver a contribution in their own working field related to the project: Hobisoa Raininoro (Art assistent and former director of CRAAM (Centre de Ressources des Arts Actuels de Madagascar, MG), Rafolo Andrianaivoarivony (Professor History University of Antanarivo, MG), Petra Van Brabandt (Doctor philosophy Sint Lucas Antwerp, B), Gwyn Campbell (Professor History Mc Gill University, CA) and Nanne op ‘t Ende (writer, NL)

Contributions by: Julien de Smet, Ronny Heiremans, Heike Langsdorf, Vanessa Müller, Filip Van Dingenen, Stijn Van Dorpe, Clémentine Vaultier, Katleen Vermeir.

The books included in the series Choreography as Conditioning are rooted in a cycle of work sessions entitled CASC at KASK, in which students work together with invited guests. They explore the notions of choreography, understood as ways of organizing subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning in both art-making and society-making. Where, how, and by whom are things organized and what kind of landscapes of experience are made (im)possible by the practices we enact and encounter?

The Orphans of Tar – A Speculative Opera answers the question posed in the second book by transforming life into voices and presenting possible mindsets through co-authoring a factual fiction. As such, it constitutes a mental space in which ficti­tious characters find an almost disturbing expansion of their thoughts. Accordingly, the book can be considered as an alle­gory of human thoughts as (possible) actions: what could happen becomes what does happen. For better and worse.

October 2019

Imagine words approaching a dance eyes closed or sleepwalking, words adrift beyond what can be envisioned beforehand, prompting writer and reader alike into a zone where time multiplies, where bodies grow footnotes and paper skin, savour the taste of language, attune their ears to the wavelength of blue. In a string of brief essays on her practice of writing choreographic poetry and scores, Janne-Camilla Lyster offers reflections on time, memory and the senses, on translation, punctuation and rhythm, on mistakes and crevasses, on the impossible and yet other things. What does it take to enter another form of existence, say, a chair?

Janne-Camilla Lyster is a writer, dancer and choreographer. She has published poetry, novels, essays and plays.

L'édition inédite et définitive (établie à partir des tapuscrits originaux en français) du traité fabuleux du philosophe tchéco-brésilien Vilém Flusser (1920-1991), une fiction philosophique et poétique qui, par des chemins détournés, nous confronte à la violence et à l'impasse des sociétés contemporaines.

Un monstre venu des profondeurs de l'océan, un poulpe vampire. Sa violence rappelle les nazis, ses mœurs sont libertaires et libidineuses. C'est une créature infernale, cannibale et brutale, pouvant changer de couleur à volonté, et dotée de trois pénis.
Et c'est notre cousin.

Dans cette fable fantastique, Vampyroteuthis infernalis émerge, non des abysses de l'océan, mais du plus profond de nous-mêmes pour nous tendre un miroir, nous montrer à quel point nous, les hommes, sommes ses proches parents et que nos histoires, nos sociétés, nos modes de vie ne sont, au fond, pas si différents.
Ce texte délibérément provocateur du philosophe tchéco-brésilien Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) n'est ni scientifique, ni objectif : c'est une fiction philosophique et poétique qui, par des chemins détournés, nous confronte à la violence et à l'impasse des sociétés contemporaines.

Flusser avait écrit ce texte en français (outre des versions en allemand et en portugais), et ce livre est la première édition du texte original en français. Il est accompagné des fantastiques dessins de son ami l'artiste et « zoosystémicien » français Louis Bec (1936-2018), co-auteur du livre, traduisant en images pseudo-scientifiques les chimères vampyroteuthiques.

Des essais de Marc Lenot, Élise Rigot et Florent Barrère éclairent la démarche de Flusser et de Bec.

17 Mouvements collects traces of a project that Decoratelier - the workspace and arts platform of Jozef Wouters - did in the fall of 2022 around the ‘5 blocs’ area in Brussels (Rempart Des Moines/Papenvest).

When Nuit Blanche invited them to build a gym, Camille Thiry and other Decoratelier associates did not want to design another generic muscle cage. Together with the neighbourhoods inhabitants, they built 17 distinct movement spaces, each tailor-made to an individual’s size, needs, dreams and aches. The gym equipment has meanwhile been removed from public space, but this eponymous book (ed. by Jozef Wouters) combines notes and reflections (language: French) by Camille with beautiful photography by Enzo Smits, documenting the ingenious and unique negotiations that were a part of this collaboration.

This experimental children’s book narrates cross-species practices of survival across the Indonesian archipelago, centring the perspectives of local animals such as endangered monkeys, cosmopolitan rats, migrant sparrows and fugitive dogs. Written in the form of a play, its six episodes ground the readers in the animals’ struggles and aspirations as they go about their daily lives and face the consequences of postcolonial erasure, ecological destruction and capitalist expansion. While the stories unfold, their interconnected existences become an archive of uncertainties, where the fate of many different creatures, humans included, is inseparable from each other.

As a script for intergenerational transmission, the book thoughtfully combines dialogues, songs and drawings, with contextualising essays and extensive notations. Through these different modes of reading, children and adults alike will learn about cross-species solidarity and rebellious movements, but also about disappearing Indigenous cosmologies, and the brave women who wove cloths around the mountains in eco-political resistance.

The first thing a traveller has to learn in Palestine is to wait: the Palestinians have been doing it for more than 50 years. In the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and on the West Bank, they have been waiting for permission to return ever since the Nabka, the catastrophe of 1948, when they were driven out of their houses and away from their land.

In November 2002, the Brussels-based authors of Time Suspended went on a ten-day visit to Palestine. Like most, everything they knew of the country came from media. They discovered a complex and intricate society that could not be summed up in a soundbite. The many full-bleed images of Palestine presented here (many of them depict a somewhat deserted, laid-back, sleepy, place) challenge years of media-tainted observation and truly give insight into the daily lives of its inhabitants.