In our daily lives we inhabit multiple spaces and hold different roles as residents, members of artists’ studios, workers within and around institutions. In an urban environment it is impossible to escape affecting and being affected by processes of gentrification. In this context we ask: what does it mean to be a good neighbour? How do we untangle the complexities of our complicity in the displacement of marginalised communities?  How do we foster intergenerational infrastructures of knowledge to sustain anti-gentrification struggles against capitalist exploitation?

Through a group role playing game (RPG) and over two sessions, we will grapple with our individual and collective identities  focusing on the infinite possibilities of practicing solidarity with present and future communities fighting gentrification in our cities.

The scenarios used in the game are based on stories encountered during Anti-Gentrification School, a Rotterdam based initiative and are creatively enhanced by strategies of supernatural justice.

What is an act? Do acts require subjects, or God? And if not, what distinguishes action from mere movement? Is an act thinkable in terms of pure actuality or must it always imply a dimension of potentiality? This year we return with another set of sessions exploring the concepts of action and actuality in the Islamic philosophical mediation of the Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic traditions. Following on from last year’s tracing of the competing lines of interpretation of Aristotle’s notion of ‘active intellect’ – from Alexander of Aphrodisias to Al-Farabi and later figures – we will take Ernst Bloch’s Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left as a point of departure for a wider discussion of these questions.

Which strategies are deployed within which territorial struggles? In what ways do they complement or exclude each other? The struggle for territory (the land) has a long history, and cinema often played a role in it: by witnessing, denouncing, depicting and sometimes participating. The way resistance is portrayed or influenced by film, is a strategy in itself.

In March, we organized the first edition of Caillou in Brussels, in which we presented and discussed many films on/as strategies within territorial resistance. For SU25, we will restage the festival and invite you to collaborate with us on the zine.

In the late nineteenth century, U.S. authorities sought to enforce racial and moral distinctions at a newly emergent federal border. To do so, they relied on evidence vulnerable to intentional and unintentional sabotage, including visual inspection, photographs, and public records. In the first of these two sessions, we will read and discuss historical work by Mae Ngai on the ‘evidentiary spiral’ created by border authorities’ demands for documentary proof of identities and family relationships, and by Anna Pegler-Gordon on the introduction of immigration identification photography explicitly in response to racialised anxieties surrounding Chinese immigrants. In the second of these two sessions, we will look at photographs of ‘OId Chinatown’ taken before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake by the German-American art photographer, Arnold Genthe. Across the sessions, we will consider the emergence of the new social and legal category of the ‘alien’ and its ramifications for contemporary politics.

We are in a moment that destruction and rebirth collide, where the ground beneath us is liquid. The world we know is crumbling and a new one is beginning to emerge. What direction it takes depends on how we shape it. Around a fire, we dive deep into the grief and loss of the dreams that no longer fit the future we face. Through writing and sketching, we unload our stories of disillusionment, and then place them into the fire. The next morning, we return to a cold fire pit and ask… what can we make with the ashes?

Moving and Thinking is a series of workshops led by the Movement Theory Lab to explore and trouble the boundaries between movement and thought, practice and theory—not only to encourage their mutual imbrication but also to find each term already enfolded in and essential to the other. The sessions consider the extent to which movement is a form of thought and how thinking moves. Politics (be it political movements or theories of the political) is quite literally most mobile at this meeting of forms that has often simply gone by the name of praxis. Across these four sessions, we will engage theories of and in movement (like Pope.L’s Hole Theory) not only to learn how to move and think otherwise but also to collectively develop new forms of knowledge of, as, and through movement. This is a necessarily accumulative and collaborative practice—participation in all three workshops is strongly encouraged.

Robert Meister argued that the post-Holocaust security of the state of Israel functions as the “constitutive exception on which twenty-first-century humanitarianism is based” (2011). His multi-layered argument, in consequence, implies that from a Western perspective the victims of the state of Israel necessarily must appear as terrorist, “evil” and illegitimate as long as they resist. Hence, the dehumanization of Palestinians is systemic and follows from Israel’s function as the West’s techno-scientific laboratory for exceptional state violence. Meanwhile, the old Zionist dream of the “disappearance of the Palestinians” has turned into a live-streamed genocide and paved the way for a new extreme “normality.” Within this (post)humanitarian battle zone, Palestinians, civilians and combatants alike, are not only the physical but also the ideological target. Palestinians, voluntarily or not, by resisting Israeli state violence, also resist the current world order. In this workshop, we discuss how ideologies of dehumanization, dehistoricization and singularization manufacture consent to such policies.

Literature: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/against-singularity

In the era of queer liberalism, fluidity functions as a concept to formalize both the infrastructure of gender as well as its sexual liberation. In the performing arts, in particular, figures like fluidity, alongside vulnerability, care, and other forms of intense relationality, organize the discourse around the relationship between the body and the social. This two-part reading group uses the blanket provocation «Against Fluidity» to think gender, instead, in its antagonistic, dialectical, lived negativity, as a “site of agency, constraint, and social signification.”

The workshop format explores the potential of empowerment through collective physical
movement, using martial arts as a starting point to experiment with and transgress into different forms of movement exploration.

The participants learn the basics of the martial arts discipline Muay Thai and play with the performative transgression of the movement patterns. We will also touch on the specific use of martial arts as a tool for trauma work. We aim to nurture a feeling of agency through physical practice and strengthen the spirit and the abilities to fight the fights that are meaningful at present.

All bodies and fitness levels are welcome, and you don't need experience in martial arts or be very sporty, but you should be willing and ready to sweat and be in close contact with other bodies. If there are particular needs/injuries, please let me know before hand so I can adapt the exercise if needed.

Liberal democracies are everywhere on the way out. Tyranny seems to be the order of the day. The neoliberal regime of self-optimisation and self-oppression gives place to the tyrannical regime of data collection and AI-based optimisation. The regime expects not only cooperation but endorsement: we should not just bear silently our oppression but desire to be oppressed. The technologies of tyranny target and shape our desires. The primary object of exploitation is desire, but the prime means of resistance is desire as well. If it were possible to resist the technologies of tyrannical regimes, it would desire differently, better, and more. What could that look like? This is the question we want to explore in this workshop— both pragmatically and philosophically. For proper philosophy is empowerment. The means of such empowerment is a creative transformation of desire towards motivation and joy. This workshop is an experimental exploration of these themes.

Essay-documentary, 73min, 2024

Consider cutting a tomato open, consider the worlds contained within. Consider a recipe for pickled tomatoes in a world full of LED-light grown, rock-wool sown tomatoes. Consider following tomatoes from closed-off Dutch greenhouses to Moldova, home to the filmmaker and many greenhouse workers, who leave their own tomato patches to work behind glass walls. Consider your guide to be a manuscript full of family recipes and countless ways of fermenting tomatoes.

In this two-part workshop we will work through the categories of “use” and “desire” as they relate to the question of property. Often, Marxist critiques of property arrive at a disaggregated legal concept of property wherein the political question becomes, how should resources be used? Rather than, who should own what? Yet the emphasis on ‘mere use’ can revert to a pre-critical conception of property that confuses the social determination of use or need with a quasi-natural conception of the social.

In the first workshop, “Use”, we will read Kornelia Hafner’s 1989 text ‘Use-Value Fetishism’ together. In the second workshop, “Desire”, I will present a provisional thesis on desire that incorporates discussion from the first workshop. Here, desire will be recovered not via, say, the aesthetic subject or psychoanalytic unconscious, but the legal subject, with the aim of reevaluating a political articulation of social reproduction which takes neither the needs or desires of subjects as self-evident.

In our daily lives we inhabit multiple spaces and hold different roles as residents, members of artists’ studios, workers within and around institutions. In an urban environment it is impossible to escape affecting and being affected by processes of gentrification. In this context we ask: what does it mean to be a good neighbour? How do we untangle the complexities of our complicity in the displacement of marginalised communities?  How do we foster intergenerational infrastructures of knowledge to sustain anti-gentrification struggles against capitalist exploitation?

Through a group role playing game (RPG) and over two sessions, we will grapple with our individual and collective identities  focusing on the infinite possibilities of practicing solidarity with present and future communities fighting gentrification in our cities.

The scenarios used in the game are based on stories encountered during Anti-Gentrification School, a Rotterdam based initiative and are creatively enhanced by strategies of supernatural justice.

Which strategies are deployed within which territorial struggles? In what ways do they complement or exclude each other? The struggle for territory (the land) has a long history, and cinema often played a role in it: by witnessing, denouncing, depicting and sometimes participating. The way resistance is portrayed or influenced by film, is a strategy in itself.

In March, we organized the first edition of Caillou in Brussels, in which we presented and discussed many films on/as strategies within territorial resistance. For SU25, we will restage the festival and invite you to collaborate with us on the zine.

Shadow Text is a choreographic translation of Les Guérillères, a feminist epic novel written by Monique Wittig (1971). Les Guérillières is a three part epic following the transition out of a hetero-patriachial culture and into the formation of a new semiotic order of lesbian relationality. Through sound, text, and movement Shadow Text explodes the epic novel, creating an immersive performance where bodily grammar cracks open the text letting words act themselves out upon and within the bodies of the audience. Shadow Text takes on Wittig’s aesthetic-political project, which can be characterized through three beliefs—first, that all political revolution must start with language; second, that poetics are the location where change can manifest itself on and between our bodies; and third, that language is the means of political resistance and creativity that we all have access to.

In the late nineteenth century, U.S. authorities sought to enforce racial and moral distinctions at a newly emergent federal border. To do so, they relied on evidence vulnerable to intentional and unintentional sabotage, including visual inspection, photographs, and public records. In the first of these two sessions, we will read and discuss historical work by Mae Ngai on the ‘evidentiary spiral’ created by border authorities’ demands for documentary proof of identities and family relationships, and by Anna Pegler-Gordon on the introduction of immigration identification photography explicitly in response to racialised anxieties surrounding Chinese immigrants. In the second of these two sessions, we will look at photographs of ‘OId Chinatown’ taken before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake by the German-American art photographer, Arnold Genthe. Across the sessions, we will consider the emergence of the new social and legal category of the ‘alien’ and its ramifications for contemporary politics.

The workshop format explores the potential of empowerment through collective physical
movement, using martial arts as a starting point to experiment with and transgress into different forms of movement exploration.

The participants learn the basics of the martial arts discipline Muay Thai and play with the performative transgression of the movement patterns. We will also touch on the specific use of martial arts as a tool for trauma work. We aim to nurture a feeling of agency through physical practice and strengthen the spirit and the abilities to fight the fights that are meaningful at present.

All bodies and fitness levels are welcome, and you don't need experience in martial arts or be very sporty, but you should be willing and ready to sweat and be in close contact with other bodies. If there are particular needs/injuries, please let me know before hand so I can adapt the exercise if needed.

This workshop reappraises Tamás's essay On Post-Fascism and its use of Fraenkel's The Dual State in light of recent developments in the U.S. and elsewhere, which weaponise the institution of citizenship both in terms of restrictions to its accessibility and threats of denaturalisation, on the one hand, and attempts to situate it within a critique of political economy with recourse to Balibar's mid-period work, on the other. The point of the workshop is twofold: First, to register transformations and tendencies in the shape of actual and projected legislation, second, to tentatively elaborate a framework for conceptualising the present conjuncture, that is to say, to reconsider how the tricky mediation between the state-citizen and capital-labour relation – which despite belonging to different discourses are surely non-incidentally connected – might be thought, a problem that in our view poses itself with renewed urgency given the further collapse of the economic and political spheres.

In the era of queer liberalism, fluidity functions as a concept to formalize both the infrastructure of gender as well as its sexual liberation. In the performing arts, in particular, figures like fluidity, alongside vulnerability, care, and other forms of intense relationality, organize the discourse around the relationship between the body and the social. This two-part reading group uses the blanket provocation «Against Fluidity» to think gender, instead, in its antagonistic, dialectical, lived negativity, as a “site of agency, constraint, and social signification.”

Moving and Thinking is a series of workshops led by the Movement Theory Lab to explore and trouble the boundaries between movement and thought, practice and theory—not only to encourage their mutual imbrication but also to find each term already enfolded in and essential to the other. The sessions consider the extent to which movement is a form of thought and how thinking moves. Politics (be it political movements or theories of the political) is quite literally most mobile at this meeting of forms that has often simply gone by the name of praxis. Across these four sessions, we will engage theories of and in movement (like Pope.L’s Hole Theory) not only to learn how to move and think otherwise but also to collectively develop new forms of knowledge of, as, and through movement. This is a necessarily accumulative and collaborative practice—participation in all three workshops is strongly encouraged.

I would like to present about a book proposal currently being developed with Prof. Sophie Chamas (SOAS) on martyrdom and other spectral subjectivities that haunt the normalizer Arab state.

Pickles can fizz without any fuel. A jar of fermented tomatoes can be a character in a film. Tomatoes and their trade routes can change landscapes. Departing from pickled tomatoes, I invite you to join an evening carried and transformed by a common recipe for fermenting with salt. You will be part of a communal act of preservation by fermenting with salt—including food, stories, and other surprising moments that occur when a gathering is shaped by an ancient recipe. A guided tour through the tactile, alchemical process of fermentation.Bring your own recipes for fermentation, your cultures to share, a jar and ingredients for a pickle. We will ferment, eat, drink, sit around and read a selection of text fragments that can expand on the practice of fermentation in the midst of this heart-broken era.

Liberal democracies are everywhere on the way out. Tyranny seems to be the order of the day. The neoliberal regime of self-optimisation and self-oppression gives place to the tyrannical regime of data collection and AI-based optimisation. The regime expects not only cooperation but endorsement: we should not just bear silently our oppression but desire to be oppressed. The technologies of tyranny target and shape our desires. The primary object of exploitation is desire, but the prime means of resistance is desire as well. If it were possible to resist the technologies of tyrannical regimes, it would desire differently, better, and more. What could that look like? This is the question we want to explore in this workshop— both pragmatically and philosophically. For proper philosophy is empowerment. The means of such empowerment is a creative transformation of desire towards motivation and joy. This workshop is an experimental exploration of these themes.

WE presents a two-day workshop at Summer University, investigating the production of trust within groups, through workshops based around collective forms of solidarity, conspiracy and play.

In the way the corporate sector uses ‘team-building’ techniques like the ‘Trust Fall’ to awkwardly catalyse stronger bond-making between members of its production process, we will propose and deploy different artificial strategies for making, breaking and subverting bonds to be used across our workshops.

We will look at a history of techniques used to intervene directly in social relations as with the in-group as their medium. Participants will have a chance to gamify trust through their own experimental proposals, which could be anything from a Summer University issued currency, to a choreographic semiosis like a Freemason’s handshake.

My work in ecological redirection explores the complex relationships between human attachments and the crisis-driven territories we inhabit, with a focus on ecological redirection and the long-term sustainability of human practices within the Earth system. Drawing on the concept of negative commons, I examine how renunciations can reshape societal models while respecting planetary boundaries. Central to this inquiry is the role of technology—particularly zombie technologies (José Halloy), which persist despite their unsustainable impacts and hinder necessary transformation. I also explore how digital culture, esoteric knowledge, and conspiracy theories shape contemporary worldviews and geopolitical shifts. Through processes of dismantling and withdrawal, this work challenges attachments to both material and immaterial realms, offering a vision of sublation that transcends the current state without returning to former conditions (and without fantasizing going back to a pre-modern state - whatever that means). It calls for a concrete rethinking of modes of living, production, technologies, organizations, etc. to ensure long-term, strong sustainability within the context of an evolving Earth system.

Claire Fontaine has been developing the concept of human strike since 2004, describing it as a type of strike inherited from revolutionary feminism whose battleground is the life form at large and not only one’s productive identity as it’s recognized by society.

We will bring to the discussion several studies in what Foucault calls practices of freedom, opposing them to the practices of liberation that delay the moment in which freedom will finally be enjoyable, reproducing a procrastination of joy in function of the sacrificed present moment – that can be found in waged labour or religious ideology.

The practice of freedom is the refusal of delaying the present, the urgence of investigating and transforming what limits our forces, weakening us right now and possibly destroying us tomorrow if we don’t take action.

The workshop format explores the potential of empowerment through collective physical
movement, using martial arts as a starting point to experiment with and transgress into different forms of movement exploration.

The participants learn the basics of the martial arts discipline Muay Thai and play with the performative transgression of the movement patterns. We will also touch on the specific use of martial arts as a tool for trauma work. We aim to nurture a feeling of agency through physical practice and strengthen the spirit and the abilities to fight the fights that are meaningful at present.

All bodies and fitness levels are welcome, and you don't need experience in martial arts or be very sporty, but you should be willing and ready to sweat and be in close contact with other bodies. If there are particular needs/injuries, please let me know before hand so I can adapt the exercise if needed.

Looking for the Heat is a somatic workshop exploring heat as a catalyst for transformation, rooted in the energetic, political, and communal dynamics of rave culture. Rave is approached not just as nightlife, but as a choreographic lineage—where bodies generate heat collectively through repetition, sweat, collapse, and euphoria.

In this workshop, the ethos of rave is translated into a focused somatic environment. Participants are guided through movement and vocal scores that explore how heat builds, moves, and reshapes us—through friction, rhythm, and collective attunement. The pace is intentional, offering space to tune into sensation, intensity, and care.

Blending practices from somatics, sound, and collective care, the workshop draws on rave’s tools—bass, breath, repetition, and duration. Looking for the Heat invites you into a space of shared intensity, where dance becomes a way to metabolise pressure and imagine new ways of being together.

WE presents a two-day workshop at Summer University, investigating the production of trust within groups, through workshops based around collective forms of solidarity, conspiracy and play.

In the way the corporate sector uses ‘team-building’ techniques like the ‘Trust Fall’ to awkwardly catalyse stronger bond-making between members of its production process, we will propose and deploy different artificial strategies for making, breaking and subverting bonds to be used across our workshops.

We will look at a history of techniques used to intervene directly in social relations as with the in-group as their medium. Participants will have a chance to gamify trust through their own experimental proposals, which could be anything from a Summer University issued currency, to a choreographic semiosis like a Freemason’s handshake.

O meu gosto e melhor na sua boca - my taste is better in your mouth. A_gente discovered the delightful inscription, with its sweet aftertaste of transindividuation, on a plaque on a street of Lisbon. Its carnal immediacy calls for, if anything, a good enough psyop you couldn’t not be a part of. What if we grow our beloved PAF into a special site of emplotment, taking the shape of a conceptual murder & mystery? On the tip of our tongue, ready to be swallowed: entheogenic, computationally aware, Bacurau-infused fragments and prompts equivocating with Brazilian anthropophagic philosophy; ways of unpredicting the world, from the macro-financial to fermentation enzymes to the ancestral art of sunsetting; earthly processão of diagonals and fangs, tearing through larval process philosophy; leftist dervish (anti)protocols for shared metastability, as we explore and cultivate dissipative ecologies and practices for (re)collecting collective intelligence. For now: mind – assume –  asymmetries.

About us:
A_gente is a one-way travel agency

JJ follows Ami and Popo's journey to New York during the spring of 2022. Retracing the footsteps of Jill Johnston (1929-2010), the two lesbian researchers meet people who knew Jill as a dance critic, radical lesbian and performer. The many facets of Jill Johnston provide access to lesbian legacies, the role of lesbians in art, and bodies in activist spaces.

This workshop reappraises Tamás's essay On Post-Fascism and its use of Fraenkel's The Dual State in light of recent developments in the U.S. and elsewhere, which weaponise the institution of citizenship both in terms of restrictions to its accessibility and threats of denaturalisation, on the one hand, and attempts to situate it within a critique of political economy with recourse to Balibar's mid-period work, on the other. The point of the workshop is twofold: First, to register transformations and tendencies in the shape of actual and projected legislation, second, to tentatively elaborate a framework for conceptualising the present conjuncture, that is to say, to reconsider how the tricky mediation between the state-citizen and capital-labour relation – which despite belonging to different discourses are surely non-incidentally connected – might be thought, a problem that in our view poses itself with renewed urgency given the further collapse of the economic and political spheres.

Within the arts, the notion of care is simply everywhere. Contemporary invocations of care tend to position maintenance and interdependence as radical alternatives to a present, in which lives based on extraction, exhaustion, social isolation and inequality seem to become unmanageable. Even when acknowledging the racialized, gendered and colonial realities that organize reproductive labour, affirmative discourses around care tend to turn care into a promise. If there was just more care (for the planet, non-human and human beings, within communities, in working relationships, in families and friendships, from the state, for ourselves), this perspective seems to imply, life would be more liveable. This optimistic turn towards reproduction risks to separate reproductive labour from its function in reproducing capitalist relations, often unwillingly naturalizing and moralizing care work by the back door. Challenging care optimism, this workshop proposes to collectively delve into readings that instead of equipping care with autonomous value allow to imagine liberation from reproduction as we know it.

In "The Broken Archive" larp (live-action role play), you are invited to collectively narrate a story of a family based on the pieces of torn-apart family photographs. You'll create characters as family members, explore the secrets and dramatic events behind the photographs by playing out short scenes, and eventually discover the reason why and by whom the archive was destroyed. This larp is inspired by a real event: when Jana’s grandmother tore up every photo of a family member after her death. The Broken Archive project is a research on the societal pressure to define one's identity and worth through fitting into family expectations centered around work, level of income, successful marriages, and certain types of behaviors, exploring the emotional toll of feeling inadequate in a culture that prioritizes productivity and obedience above all.

O meu gosto e melhor na sua boca - my taste is better in your mouth. A_gente discovered the delightful inscription, with its sweet aftertaste of transindividuation, on a plaque on a street of Lisbon. Its carnal immediacy calls for, if anything, a good enough psyop you couldn’t not be a part of. What if we grow our beloved PAF into a special site of emplotment, taking the shape of a conceptual murder & mystery? On the tip of our tongue, ready to be swallowed: entheogenic, computationally aware, Bacurau-infused fragments and prompts equivocating with Brazilian anthropophagic philosophy; ways of unpredicting the world, from the macro-financial to fermentation enzymes to the ancestral art of sunsetting; earthly processão of diagonals and fangs, tearing through larval process philosophy; leftist dervish (anti)protocols for shared metastability, as we explore and cultivate dissipative ecologies and practices for (re)collecting collective intelligence. For now: mind – assume –  asymmetries.

About us:
A_gente is a one-way travel agency

tbc

In "A Mouthful of Tongues," we encounter a hostess, in cowboy boots and a suit. Her aim: to give the audience a pleasant time. Thirteen tongues spill from her mouth, guttural screams fill the air. While her body is composed, the voice seems to come from a distance or another source. This ventriloquist act, throwing off the voice, welcomes the many- tongued human. Hidden in her pockets, notes suggest where to go next. Oscillating between humour and darkness, this performance plays tricks that appear to defy natural laws. This workshop focus is on playful experimentation and the discovery of the voice as a powerful tool of expression.

Explore extended and experimental voice techniques like the many kinds of growling, screaming, ventriloquism, dinosaur calls and more. Through playful exercises and interactive sessions, we'll discover the diverse voices within our bodies. Movement will be our main force to guide us. This workshop is designed for anyone interested in the voice as a tool for artistic expression, regardless of their level of experience. Wear comfortable clothes and be prepared to engage in physical activities

How do artists, theorists and activists intervene in capitalist structures, such as urban developments, institutes and infrastructures, and reinterpret and reclaim spaces? How do they define their ground and forge spaces while evading being co-opted by the systems they aim to overcome? This workshop consists of two subsequent sessions. Inspired by Sylvia Wynter’s pivotal concept of "the plot,” the first session will discuss the historical, material, and metaphorical dimensions of the plot as a form of decolonial and counter-hegemonic resistance and reclamation of spaces. We will collect and share tactics, tools, and stories that reverberate with the plot concept. The second workshop aims not to talk or share tactics and tools for resistance but to enact them together. To do so, the workshop draws from the Theatre of the Oppressed and the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective techniques, using improvisation and embodied practice to deepen engagement.

Gregor releases his fifth album, Songs for springs and nails, piano, electric bass, abandoned guitar and voices Vol. I, an inventive meditation arising from tactile percussion comprised of springs, nails, plywood and piezoelectric transducers. The transducers transform a miniature and faint sonic world into an expressive and unusual landscape. Traditional instruments follow suit to sculpt motifs blending elements of jazz, musical theatre, avant garde and modernism.
‍
Featuring lyrics and voices made together with choreographer and dancer Alice Heyward, the album resembles a stage play featuring soliloquy and dialogue that deal predominantly with the psyche. Through the narrative of an evening in a bathtub, or in a garden, or in a lounge room, the listener follows a figure – or a couple – passing through regularity, turmoil, hallucination, sleep and sleeplessness. They find company among spirits, angels, demons, domestic work, visions, the night, light and body.

Within the arts, the notion of care is simply everywhere. Contemporary invocations of care tend to position maintenance and interdependence as radical alternatives to a present, in which lives based on extraction, exhaustion, social isolation and inequality seem to become unmanageable. Even when acknowledging the racialized, gendered and colonial realities that organize reproductive labour, affirmative discourses around care tend to turn care into a promise. If there was just more care (for the planet, non-human and human beings, within communities, in working relationships, in families and friendships, from the state, for ourselves), this perspective seems to imply, life would be more liveable. This optimistic turn towards reproduction risks to separate reproductive labour from its function in reproducing capitalist relations, often unwillingly naturalizing and moralizing care work by the back door. Challenging care optimism, this workshop proposes to collectively delve into readings that instead of equipping care with autonomous value allow to imagine liberation from reproduction as we know it.

This workshop is a collaborative role-playing experience where we will work together to create and act out scenarios. In the first part, we’ll explore situations where the characters seem powerless to change their circumstances. Using game design techniques, we will develop short live-action role-playing (larp) scenarios aimed at giving players a sense of agency, even in the most difficult situations. Through this process, we’ll examine these scenarios as systems and explore larp as a tool for enabling decision-making and its consequences. After the play session, we’ll discuss how role-playing can be used to tell stories, uncover agency, and create meaning. We’ll also introduce practical larp tools that you can start using right away.

Sacred Harp is a tradition of shape-note music originating in 19^th century Appalachia. “Shape-note” emerged as a way of teaching people without any formal musical literacy, and without any shared doctrinal commitments, to sing quickly and in large quantities.

As beginners ourselves, we are best equipped to explore precisely this aspect of Sacred Harp – its ostensible openness to new-comers. Normally as a new-comer to Sacred Harp you follow the sound of shouting to a room where you find around 40 people arranged in a square, facing each other. You're not taught to sing so much as compelled to, akin to the feeling of boarding a moving train.

In these reflection sessions we want to think about what it means to conjure a traditional form such as Sacred Harp from scratch – without the normal trappings of tradition (experience, charisma, etc.) – with a view to thinking about its transmissibility in the absence of these trappings. In our timetabled sessions, as well as practising the method, we will reflect on these questions, and on the idea of Sacred Harp itself.

Some of us are also interested in starting more regular singings in Brussels, so people who are into participating in that should feel especially welcome!

SdA examines the production of meaning, the formulation of concepts, and world building of counterrevolution – and it investigates the methods of countering the counterrevolution. We first want to equip ourselves with the necessary concepts to become aware of the situation of counterrevolution by reading and discussing texts on tactics and strategies together. Then we want to develop and test practices of countering and conspiratorial organization together.

As an open discursive platform, SdA aims to learn and inform by building concepts and developing tactics and strategies of communitization. Since SdA’s notion of art is located within political and economic infrastructures, it is about similarities between military, political, psychological and “artistic” arts and their inherent theory of representation. Because the circuits of representation have real effects, these artistic methods of formulation, modelling and conceptualization are examined to see how they can be used collectively to organize new structures of realistic worlds.

O meu gosto e melhor na sua boca - my taste is better in your mouth. A_gente discovered the delightful inscription, with its sweet aftertaste of transindividuation, on a plaque on a street of Lisbon. Its carnal immediacy calls for, if anything, a good enough psyop you couldn’t not be a part of. What if we grow our beloved PAF into a special site of emplotment, taking the shape of a conceptual murder & mystery? On the tip of our tongue, ready to be swallowed: entheogenic, computationally aware, Bacurau-infused fragments and prompts equivocating with Brazilian anthropophagic philosophy; ways of unpredicting the world, from the macro-financial to fermentation enzymes to the ancestral art of sunsetting; earthly processão of diagonals and fangs, tearing through larval process philosophy; leftist dervish (anti)protocols for shared metastability, as we explore and cultivate dissipative ecologies and practices for (re)collecting collective intelligence. For now: mind – assume –  asymmetries.

About us:
A_gente is a one-way travel agency

You are invited to bring a dream, a fantasy or an IRL group dynamic (workplace dispute, community-based dilemma, family drama, etc.) with you as the Protagonist to the Spectator Salon. Facilitated by TO Joker & integrative psychotherapist Bea Xu, we will use tools from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and some occasional interventions from the world of psychodrama to explore and work through the dynamic together as a group – empowering those who embody other characters in the dynamic as ‘Spectators’ who can also explore their own agency and subjectivity in relation to their fellow roleplayers.  The session will include a check-in, group container build, warm up game(s), TO ‘forum’, debrief and check-out.  Please try to attend the whole workshop if you decide to take part.

With events like Gaza and the undoing of the U.S.A.-centric international order adding to ongoing technocapitalist acceleration and ecological catastrophe, it seems clear that the Globe of Western modernity is shattered beyond repair. In such a context, how to weave alternative and sustainable world-(dis)orders becomes an urgent theoretico-practical problem. In this workshop, and drawing from insights from “ontological turn” Anthropology and Amazonian perspectivism, I would like to offer a juridico-political concept of multiverse, as well as some ideas about political ecology, in order to suggest forms of worldmaking and political organizing that do not presuppose totality. Participants will be invited to share perspectives from their own organizational practices and reflect about how they can compose political ecosystems without the need for sharing the same goals, practices, or even the same world.

Please join Kwamé Omari in gathering at this year's Summer University. Omari will be holding space around conversation (inclusive of silence), tea, and text — thinking of space as an agent of revolution and a locus for sharing existential ideas and feelings. He will be present during the final days of SU25 to host a sacred space for sharing.

Sacred Harp is a tradition of shape-note music originating in 19^th century Appalachia. “Shape-note” emerged as a way of teaching people without any formal musical literacy, and without any shared doctrinal commitments, to sing quickly and in large quantities.

As beginners ourselves, we are best equipped to explore precisely this aspect of Sacred Harp – its ostensible openness to new-comers. Normally as a new-comer to Sacred Harp you follow the sound of shouting to a room where you find around 40 people arranged in a square, facing each other. You're not taught to sing so much as compelled to, akin to the feeling of boarding a moving train.

In these reflection sessions we want to think about what it means to conjure a traditional form such as Sacred Harp from scratch – without the normal trappings of tradition (experience, charisma, etc.) – with a view to thinking about its transmissibility in the absence of these trappings. In our timetabled sessions, as well as practising the method, we will reflect on these questions, and on the idea of Sacred Harp itself.

Some of us are also interested in starting more regular singings in Brussels, so people who are into participating in that should feel especially welcome!