Are our
memories
gone?
memories
gone?
a§s is a tool for aesthetic, philosophical, political and poetic experimentation. Every second Wednesday of the month, a§s invites guest contributors, artists and researchers to honour a desire that they will be able to develop in a project that will be made public. Self-initiated, this project of multiple collaborations is a space for meeting, inventing and sharing.
Camp Kill Yourself is a series of videos that began in the late 1990s, combining skateboarding, antics and stunts, each more extreme than the last. Created by Bam Margera and director Brandon DiCamillo, the series is the big name behind the hugely popular Jackass series, which was adopted by MTV in the early 2000s. The team, made up mainly of skateboarders, produced videos combining skateboarding, music and light-hearted jokes. Produced with limited, often pirated, resources, the videos made repeated use of bodily provocations that first interspersed with images of skateboarding; figures often shown in two versions: one a failure, the other a success, glory or a sometimes violent fall, bodies sliding through space. Influenced by the chaotic and extreme performances of certain punk artists (most notably GG Allin, to whom an alcoholic and urinary tribute is paid), the phenomenon is one of generalised unconsciousness and awakens in the viewer the limits of what he or she can admit—like Michael Hanneke's Funny Game, which I appreciate just as much.
This vignette highlights the singular joys that enable and enhance uninhibited, nothing-conceptual, cheeky-resolutely sexy attitudes. From the desire to create one's own living tools for experimentation, surveying and error, a§s feeds on the legacies that inspire these attitudes, and becomes a project in its own right—albeit a rather conformist one by comparison. These practices emphasise the process as a tool rather than their ends, in a dynamic that genuinely welcomes trial-and its doubts. a§s is a project that adapts to the proposals of its guests. Like Public Access Poetry or Mel Chin & The Gala Committee (In the name of the Place) in completely different registers, these practices above all question the spaces that make it possible to accommodate these experimental postures. They awaken the idea that having such a space, whether to work or to express oneself, is also a matter of privilege-that which allows the freedom to do: if freedom is meant to be infinite, but power is limited, it is an immense asset to have access to the means that allow us to go beyond what limits it. The question of space, first of all, brings with it all the material means that frame, encourage or constrain the production of its effects.
This essential freedom, our desire to express a point of view in its tenuous correlation with the world and to embrace all the ambiguities that run through us, requires that there be places and people to welcome them, who take on an imperative of care, a responsibility to listen. These relationships of contact, which are lived through the eyes, in a sensitive relationship with the experience of the other, allow the mutually desired encounter to radiate. Here, I think spontaneously of Lygia Clark's Relational Objects, but also of Laurence Rassel: on the one hand, of manifesting memories-immediately, and appointments; on the other, of the importance of hospitality.
From these reflections on hospitality, I draw inspiration from the attitude of the hostesses, as a concept or metaphor, from the know-how in charge of the work of hospitality, from their smiles. They evoke the work of the shadows so that everything can run smoothly on stage. This attitude is akin to an economy of giving, which this role epitomises: assigned to the female gender because of its propensity to listen, being available and provide care, this figure illustrates the multiple expertise of those who welcome; although by definition, they do not own the place they occupy. Hospitality is all about exposure to others, insofar as they affect us. Meetings, from which genuine moments of sharing can emerge, are just as likely to renew this outward dynamic. By inviting these people, by encouraging the joy of doing things and honouring their desires, our freedoms radiate outwards. The responsibility of those who welcome is to allow this expression to be free, to nurture trust.
Finally, exhibiting: honouring the guests' intuitions, making a proposal concrete and tangible, and putting a deadline to it. The collaborations are intended to be total, adaptive, spontaneous and available to those invited. Ex-posing, too, posing on the outside. Fading into the background, as an otherwise powerful action; allowing a transgression of interiority and exteriority. Exhibiting as a gesture of memory, of encounter, of contact. Intriguing, unknown, without seeking to assimilate or reduce to the known: an exhibition gives place, without asking for reciprocity or a pact. Hospitality also means allowing oneself to be altered by the other, letting them call my home and my identity into question.
In addition to exhibitions, there are the usual ‘vernissages’ (vernissages in French means ‘opening’ whose etymology implies "putting on varnish"), the name of which already betrays the custom. To exhibit goes far beyond all mundanities: it is already a powerful act for the participants, who in turn invite others to feel invited; and to anchor a memory for everyone, some part of the exhibition, intrinsically presupposes a collective space. The text, the traditional index of the art exhibition, is also an object of relationships and contact, enabling several exercises to be activated: that of meeting, collaborating, understanding, remembering, absorbing and digesting.
It's understandable that the members of Jackass wanted to avoid the taint of respectability: they stood at the confluence of the lazy-prolific ethos of skate culture, having unearthed an ambush comedy for the golden age of YouTube exhibitionism; and in the same movement, older and more honourable artistic traditions: silent cinema, Dadaism, Theatre of Cruelty, body art and other performative forms. Their formula was not one of consensus, rupture or criticism, but of expression wherever it could blossom, with no stakes and no pretensions, and each time offering the possibility of breaking free from conceptual constraints.
The meaning is never set in stone, the practice remains in motion. A movement that allows the project to enjoy great flexibility, a malleable density each time reinvented as soon as the protagonist changes. Its thickness grows with the diversity of the proposals. It's not an identity, it's a system. Modular, adjustable, perfectible, transitory, in motion, unstable, made-to-measure, fallow, assumed. Inventing and recognising ourselves is a way of expressing our movement, our actions and reflections, of expressing the responsibility that each of us accepts, in a virtuous loop that discovers its ends once the experience is complete. The exhibition is nothing more than a showcase. It's nothing more, nothing less, than the uncovering of an intuition, an ethic that becomes an aesthetic.
ASSS FOR SPASSS
Second Wednesday of the month
Chaussée d'Alsemberg, 110
1060 Saint-Gilles, Bruxelles
The meaning is never set in stone, the practice remains in motion. A movement that allows the project to enjoy great flexibility, a malleable density each time reinvented as soon as the protagonist changes. Its thickness grows with the diversity of the proposals. It's not an identity, it's a system. Modular, adjustable, perfectible, transitory, in motion, unstable, made-to-measure, fallow, assumed. Inventing and recognising ourselves is a way of expressing our movement, our actions and reflections, of expressing the responsibility that each of us accepts, in a virtuous loop that discovers its ends once the experience is complete. The exhibition is nothing more than a showcase. It's nothing more, nothing less, than the uncovering of an intuition, an ethic that becomes an aesthetic.
The exhibition is less a form of codified representation inherited from institutional spaces; it is a circumstance, a zone of meetings and assemblies of human beings and their interactions. What happens on these occasions is a series of inadvertencies, from the occupation of a stage where the speakers deploy a subject that is intended to be totally free —‘you do whatever you want’ being the sole guideline of the project— and whose use produces a considered understanding. The subject, the proposal, tends to have a lasting effect on those who share it (a memory!); and the event then takes on the value of a celebration: a unique and irreplaceable organisation, born of the responsibility of all those who organise the festivities. Creating an occasion to welcome them allows the wishes of those involved to be seen as serious and real, and to be honoured rather than legitimised. All these people come together in the affirmation of free expression, in an exercise that can reflect, express, sketch out, depict —if not confront— the real world, and that through this action it is possible to understand at least a small part of that world; that this occasion makes possible to produce an single image of it, which allows a world to slowly expand. And that beyond this intellectual striptease, a project is just that, and that once finished, we all return to the complex and unresolved blur of our mysterious condition.
ASSS FOR SPASSS
Second Wednesday of the month
Chaussée d'Alsemberg, 110
1060 Saint-Gilles, Bruxelles
—
Starhawk, Quel monde voulons-nous?, 2019
Starhawk, Comment s’organiser? Manuel pour l’action collective, 2021
Bifo (Franco Berardi), Respirer—Chaos et poésie, 2024
María Grace Salamanca Gonzaléz, Esthétiques du care pour l’Anthropocène, 2023
Mark Fisher, Désirs Postcapitalistes, 2022
Erving Goffman, Façons de parler, 1987
ContraPoints
Paul B Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi, 2022
Auriane Preud’homme, Gossiping is Not (Just) Bitching, 2022
Aristarkhova Irina, HOME-SITE: Homeliness of the House and its ‘Feminine Hospitality’, 2007
Genesis Breyer P. Orridge, La poésie n’est pas une solution, Entretien avec Genesis Breyer P. Orridge, France Culture, 2012
Anne-Marie Christin, L’image écrite ou la déraison graphique, 1995
Thierry Chancogne, Histoire du graphisme avant la modernité en trois temps et cinq mouvements, 2018
Yvonne Rainer, Work 1961—73, 2020
Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are facts, 2006
Fischli & Weiss, Fleurs & Questions, 2007
Donna Haraway, Vivre avec le trouble, 2020
Ruwen Ogien, L’influence de l’odeur des croissants chauds sur la bonté humaine, et autres questions de philosophie morale expérimentale, 2011
Natahlie Sejan, Faire (et autres projets)
Ann Patchett, “I am a compost heap, and everything I interact with, every experience I’ve had, get shoveled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down, is digested and excreted by worms, and rots. It’s from that rich, dark humus, the combination of what you encountered, what you know and what you’ve forgotten, that ideas start to grow”.
Ryan Gander, LAX, 2021
May our joys last