by Isabel Burr Raty, Adrijana Gvozdenović and Sara Manente
with Antye Guenther, Rob Ritzen and Sina Seifee
The Block “Not in the mood” unfolded from the 3rd of May to the 31st of July 2021 as part of the a.pass Postgraduate Program. The curatorial team was composed of Isabel Burr Raty, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Antye Guenther, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen and Sina Seifee, who were previously Associate Researchers at a.pass Research Center.
The following text is divided into two parts, based on two recorded conversations to reflect on the Block curation. The first conversation took place after the first week of the Block and the second conversation was held amongst the Curators at the end of the Block. The group of Curators has decided to speak in this text from first person plural, as a ‘we’ — catalyzing the experience through one voice, to represent the plurality of the body composed of tentacular parts that they created together, or rather: that they came to be, in the process of curating.
PART I
Collaboration / Feedback as a proposal
Curating a Block prolonged a dynamic of working together, which we had developed as a group of Associate Researchers during the Cycle I of the a.pass Research Center (2018-2019).
In March 2020, during the first lockdown in Brussels, we wished to catch up with each other, bringing up the awaited topic of the feedback to the institution on our individual and collective experience at the Research Center. We set up a first online session that became feedback to ourselves, as well as being feedback to a.pass.
As Associate Researchers in a.pass, we got to know each other’s differences, to enjoy each other’s practices and company. During that time we developed a collaborative dynamic, where we responded to each other continuously — when we agreed but also when we didn’t, without consolidating the differences into one position. A dynamic that was not about devoting the shared time to our individual researches separately, but finding shared proposals and learning from each other within them. The desire to do something together came from this intensity that we still held, as well as from a need to stay in touch and to continue learning from each other.
Our feedback became a proposal when we recognized that what we were missing in the research program could become a generator for different practices within the institution. The Research Center has been established in parallel to the Postgraduate Program and we agreed that during the year that we were there, there could have been more interaction amongst the two. This led us to rethink the roles in the institution itself: What is a mentor? What is a participant? What is a curator? What is a workshop facilitator or a guest artist? — making a proposal where each one of us could shift between all these roles. This opened up new questions: What does it do to embody these different agencies? How do they inform one another? We also realized that we have something particular to offer. By acknowledging our different interests and practices we could function as a curatorial group, without denying the individual positions within it.
Curating: responsibility and agency
As former Participants and/or Associate Researchers, we understand curating at a.pass as a structural proposal for a particular approach to teaching that provides tools and creates a context for collective learning. The aim is to create a positive educational environment that is also unfolding from the bottom-up, creating different geometries of togetherness. Picking up on this ‘non-top-down’ approach and learning from Femke Snelting’s reflection on a ‘non-horizontal condition’, in which she states that the idea of the circle can be misleading because we are not all at the same distance from the center, we felt the freedom to propose an experimental way of curating a Block. As a group, we would all produce, program, mentor, give workshops, participate and take care of the space. We would respond to each other in the experience of embodying the many roles. The ability to switch sides within a pedagogical process, would strengthen curating as a collective learning practice.
(Not) in the mood
We were accountable for the possible mess that our curatorial proposal might create and took the responsibility that came with it. Being a group of six, and with all our different perspectives, it required a lot of time and attention to negotiate between our capacities, needs and desires. Furthermore, we had to find a way to hold the multiplicity of our curatorial proposal and the different research universes of the Participants in one Block. This is when we decided to think of ‘mood’ as the conceptual theme, a glue that would temporarily keep everything together, giving us the possibility to practice fluidity between the many different roles.
As a result, we developed ongoing practices, workshops proposals and reading sessions that were oriented to set different moods for the Block. Additionally, our intention with adding Not to in the mood was to think about the agency of moods in artistic processes and to question what these could add to contemporary art production if they were more acknowledged. Or perhaps to exercise how ‘not being in the mood’ generates tools of resistance within a “professional” scene that also happens to be pierced by certain principles of a neo-liberal economy.
“Not in the mood” as a set-up
Concretely, during the Opening Week, Sara Manente led the first collective practice called the “Washing machine,” an associative game about ‘obsessions’. Throughout the Block, Isabel Burr Raty offered the “Depository cat,” an ongoing practice and interactive space, where Participants shared their research in the form of treatments in order to ‘(de)particularize’ affects in creative processes. Likewise ongoing, Sina Seifee took the role of “PR” by interviewing the Participants and publishing regularly online as a different form of mentoring, fabulously speculating what their matters of care are.
During the first part of the Block, Antye Guenther facilitated “Oh so serious,” a workshop testing strategies for de-professionalization in artistic research practices. Adrijana Gvozdenović and Sara Manente hosted “Nail art affects theory,” a series of reading sessions about affect theory while doing each other’s nails, playing with the idea of mentoring as a beautification process, talking about “what makes us happy” and “why do we feel like we feel” (Sara Ahmed).
During the Halfway Days sessions with presentations and feedback, we set forth to work from stereotypical figures of mood: reflective (analyst), lighthearted (imitator), suspicious (detective), cheerful (groupie), whimsical (overthinker), ominous (diva), and gloomy (contrarian).
In the second part of the Block, Rob Ritzen in collaboration with Steyn Bergs conducted “The labour of laziness” reading sessions, proposing to think of laziness as a lateral form of political agency for artists and art workers, as a way to avoid self-exploitation.
Space
We took ‘mood’ as the umbrella term to look at the collective working space as well. We agreed on the spatial elements: a net, an inflatable cat, a dance floor — keeping in mind that a variety of practices would interact with and activate those differently. The idea was to treat the space as a character, as a subject, that hosts or triggers a moody playground for research. For the reading sessions, Rob invited artist Sofia Caesar to install an interpretation of her work “Unrest,” a 6m x 4m hanging net. This kinetic and stretchable device, that we thought of as a giant hammock, imprinted laziness into the space.
At the same time, Isabel looked for a big, seductive and inflatable object, which would invite the Participants to join her ongoing treatment and depository practice. We collectively decided on the giant inflatable cat that unexpectedly created a feeling of comfort. Together with Steven Jouwersma (Scenographic and Technical Support of a.pass) we installed the objects and worked on a playful way to place them, bringing in the dance floor as the third spatial element, which invited everyone to liberate moods by moving the body in space.
Financing
Together with Joke Liberge (Production Coordinator) and Michele Meesen (Administrator), we administered the budget in a way that reflected how we were going to work together, deciding to be paid equally. The collaborative work we envisioned was not easy to express within the financial structure of a.pass, where there is a structure in place and a fair payment scheme. This limitation brought some realism to our initial ideas. How could we distribute the money equally if we were not all doing exactly the same amount of work? In particular, not everyone was offering a workshop and mentoring for an equal amount of time and also we wanted to be present in each other’s workshops and reading sessions.
We had to figure out a system that could translate those constraints into our proposal of equal pay, as well as protect ourselves from self-exploitation. So, we adjusted our plans and the frequency of work to the overall budget reserved for curating the Block. We knew that the minimum required presence in a.pass is during the three common weeks of the Block and therefore we built our schedule around that. The structure could look simple, but it was a dissecting endeavor. We were wondering how to be sure we would do the same amount of work for this proposal. Fortunately it was previously established and in our group that we trust each other “almost blindly”.
PART II
This part functions as a report of what happened with previously described intentions and expectations, how the Block proposal influenced our practices but also our private lives, what the wishes and desires are that stayed unfulfilled and perhaps most importantly what this process taught us. We continue writing from the first person plural, to further represent the shape that ‘we’ took, acknowledging and accepting our different individual experiences, contradictions and disagreements, as parts of our tentacular curating body.
Collaboration / Sustainability
There is an aspect of cheerleading to curating, getting excited by people’s proposals and ideas, which we intentionally embraced, knowing that this might not always be a critical relationship. Furthermore, having the opportunity to navigate from being a.pass Participants and/or Associate Researchers to being those who can take care, organize, mentor or advise, brought different kinds of responsibility, which extended and enriched our artistic practices.
Surprisingly, the same questions we raised throughout the Block (deprofessionalization, the labor of laziness, affective economy) cross-pollinated the process of curating with our individual working habits and entered our private spheres.
Even though we might know how to set up conditions for working together, we are not always easy to collaborate with. Nonetheless, the collaboration model that we set up (equally shared budget, working hours and responsibilities) gave us the opportunity to truly embody generosity towards each other, in terms of understanding and giving the space for different rhythms and ways of doing. To the point that sometimes we all wanted to be the one who goes outside during a break to stand next to the smokers, not to smoke but rather to participate in the conversation. And then we would notice that it’s not a break but a curatorial program unrolling and that there are only six of us discussing it.
On the other hand, throughout the Block, a parallel chapter opened for us, where “resisting being overworked” became central. Hence procrastinating work on other projects and postponing answering emails provided time for process integration and joyfulness. This made it clear that we need to prioritize the creation of other structures of appreciation for artistic effort and work in the future.
Measuring the presence of six
Having a Curator with six heads, carrying on an educational program with content that intentionally escapes solidification, implies fragmentation and continuous moments of collective reflection. Perhaps also a full-time presence in all the activities. This was practically and often impossible, as it would have meant extra working hours overrunning the curatorial budget limit. A curatorial ideal was to be able to be present in every collective practice proposed, to work in the space more often (e.g. in the evenings), to get even more involved, transparent, intense, to see the whole performative spectrum of ‘mood’. In other words, the conditions for performativity demanded time and work that were beyond our reality.
That said, the tentacular curatorial body allowed us to experiment with and add to the a.pass horizontal-learning approach by spreading responsibilities in the exercise of changing roles. As Curators, we participated in workshops and reading sessions led by one or some of us, which proved to be a challenge, as it demanded a certain mode of suspension of excitement and discussion in order to keep this space primarily for the Participants. Conversely, adding the Mentor role to being a Curator offered the opportunity to meet Participants during collective undertakings, renovating the individual mentoring approach by having a much earlier and deeper insight into the Participant’s research/practices.
To work with ‘mood’
During the first conversations when we were planning the Block, we shared the different practices we would like to offer. While trying to understand what would be and which conceptual frame could hold them, moods and affects (especially negative ones) were recognized as common denominators each one of us could contribute to. To situate ‘mood’ in relation to artistic research was exciting, as there is a generative potential between mood and knowledge production, mood and collective learning, mood and productivity in general.
‘Mood’ was not the topic but rather the methodology, a filter we worked with and through, proposing several collective learning practices with specific angles to the subject. We recognized a.pass already nurtured the approach that allows ‘moods’ to manifest themselves in the artistic environment, specifically within a collective learning cosmos. Our intention was to take this permission further, creating proposals that would motivate the Participants to co-create their relationship with the subject.
We believe that to work with ‘mood’ means to create conditions for (at least temporary) affiliations to emerge. Besides sharing discourses and experiences within different theoretical frameworks, we also talked about our private lives, personal economies, management of time and desires that get produced by and at the same time produce our artistic practices.
What are you up to? What are your obsessions? Are you paranoid? Why do you dress like that when you go to an opening? How professional are you? Can you drop it all and be lazy? What aspects of your research, dreams and intimacy need treatment? What kind of treatment would it be? Are you in the mood for doing nails? Can a theory be considered through the beautification process? What if…?
This text was written for the publication In these circumstances: On collaboration, performativity, self-organisation and transdisciplinarity in research-based practices (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2021), which collects the texts about artistic research as it is practiced in the co-learning environment of a.pass Brussels, on the occasion of its 14 year of existence. The launch of this book coincided with the Belgian Ministry of Education’s decision to end their financial support of a.pass.