For the forth year PAF invites to a Spring Meeting that next to individual and group re- search and practices, process and production, classes, experimentation and hard work also offer a series of three seminars over nine consecutive days.
Nine days seminar with Tristan Garcia, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Ben Woodard.
This year the focus is on objects, slime and radical subjectivity, voodoo and speculation, passing from a processing of things and objects, to a deep survey of radical subjectivity in relation to our contemporary political reality probing the transformative and political potentiality of spiritual practices, and we end with three days devoted to an inquiry into the slippery territories between life and non-life, animate and inanimate and a philosophy against the human being – both the “human” and the “being” part.
The seminar format engage each lecturer three days in a row five hour per day with the intention to approach knowledge in ways specific to PAF, neither academic or artistic, di- dactic or democratic but as a shared journey into specific yet weak territories, in order to explore modes of understanding and thinking together, as well as to make it possible for a wide variety of individuals to engage on their own premises and simultaneously make the journey a challenge for the lecturer [everything is open except power point presentations, exercises, working groups and evaluation].
Apart from the seminar it is up to the participants to together engage and cross fertilize activities, interests, process and production from yoga practices to reading groups, from individual rehearsals to communal dance practices and showings, and to produce the Spring Meeting we want. As long as you don’t intend to set the place on fire PAF is open to the widest range of proposals and it is up to us to produce a curriculum, a daily routine and a politics of life.
During Spring Meeting our royal chefs Christian and Siri will provide meals three times per day, habitually, as you all know, as much as they produce magic it’s all an adventure [as usually the kitchen is open for informal collaborations and individual initiatives].
Spring Meeting Seminars are realized in collaboration with MA Choreography and Perfor- mance at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies (University of Gießen), Sandberg Insti- tute, and in association with Univ. of Dance Stockholm and The Swedish Research Council.
During Spring Meeting participation in meals are binding. Total costs per participant is 32€ per day (15€ per bed/room and 17€ for three meals including wine, coffee). Mem- bership (12€) is obligatory due to insurance reasons, valid for one year.
Limited number of participants. Reservations: Jan Ritsema: janritsema@mac.com
Biographies
Tristan Garcia (28–30 March) is a philosopher and novelist living and working in Paris. After publishing two novels next to studies in philosophy with Alain Badiou at École Normal Supérieure, he published a major philo- sophical work “Forme et Objet. Un Traité des choses”, that has stirred unusually strong reactions in the field. Or as Graham Harman proposes in his overwhelmingly positive review: “Tristan Garcia is most likely a name that we will all be pronouncing hundreds or thousands of times in the decades to come.”
Denise Ferreira da Silva (31 March – 2 April) is involved in several practices - writing, teaching, healing, painting - through which she hopes to help the project of expanding views of thinking and existing beyond the confines of modern western representation. Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. After living and teaching in the United States for almost two decades, she moved to the East End of London in 2012. Presently, she is a Professor of Ethics and Director of the Centre for Ethics and Politics, at Queen Mary, University of London.
Ben Woodard (4 – 6 April) is a 2nd year PhD student in Theory and Criticism at Western University. His work focuses on Naturphilosophie (esp. that of FWJ von Schelling) and its connections to contemporary continental thought, analytic thought, the sciences, and popular media. He serves as editor for Helvete: The Journal of Black Metal Studies, Thinking Nature, and Prosthesis: A Journal of Theory and Criticism. His first b