After last year’s success PAF invites you to the second annual Summer University. The month-long gathering brings together the unique opportunities that PAF can offer with four curatorial teams who will design and animate four different weeklong sections: music, philosophy, dance, text. Where these weeks will bring the participants should remain a mystery, as we consider curation to imply an invitation to a multiplicity of practices, processes, presentations, modes of documenting and sharing, dialoguing, discussing and talking. The motivation is to produce four shared adventures with the support of aesthetic expression and in-depth thought. We understand each week as a preparation leading up to the weekend where the emphasis is presentation, concert, performance, festival, fête, lectures or seminar that we build together.
The teams have been given complete freedom to design the seven days as they feel, gathering artists and scholars, commissioning works, inviting everybody at PAF to share and produce together weeks and weekends that celebrate our practices, giving them new frames to gain visibility, response and momentum.
During the weeks we cook individually or organise together and for the weekend PAF offers three meals per day (weekend price per person 100€ from Friday lunch to Monday breakfast and room). Come for a week+weekend (170€) or several or introduce yourself to PAF with a weekend of your interest. Everybody is welcome to contribute to the respective weeks in whatever way desired from teaching to sharing, to showing and doing.
The Summer University is for you who want to engage with all your resources in your special field of interest, but it is also for you who are curious about PAF and want a taste of what it is. The house will be boiling of practices and people but there will also be room for you who desire to create your own rhythm or just need a few days of recreation.
During the Summer University PAF will naturally function as it normally does. For you who have an individual project don’t hesitate to visit PAF also during August.
The curatorial teams have been brought together by PAF but are not attached to the organization. For Summer University PAF utilize a model where PAF as a structure is centralized but is distributed as an artistic platform and can hosts a multiplicity of initiatives. For Summer University the intention is to establish new teams each year but we also hope that teams can form that will initiate activities during the rest of the year as well.
PAF doesn’t charge for activities but only for accommodation and food. PAF is a non-profit, non-funded organization located in the French countryside north-east of Paris.
PROGRAM
Summer University opens August 4 with four days preparation leading up to the music weekend.
4 - 10 August - Talking Music
With a focus on navigating collectively through music and sound, the music week proposes new practices of listening, thinking, discussing and doing music. How can we use different perceptions of time, space and other parameters of music to mix up with and influence individual and collective practices of playing and thinking? This year emphasizes longer time slots dedicated to lectures and discussions intertwined with a program of experiments ranging from sensing time collectively to building a sound studio and rehearsing in known and new constellations.
The weekend will experience the second edition of POOF - pool of sound festival - transforming PAF to a boiling mixture of concerts, collective symphonies, live experimentation, choir adventures, a house of love or an exploration of the rainbow of room, colours, textures, acoustics and vibes all contaminating and stimulating your making and listening to music and sound.
Prepared by Sunna Ardal, Yoann Durant, Perrine en morceaux, Michael Schmid
11 - 17 August - Philosophy: (In)Formalizing the Outside: Sex, Mathematics, Cybernetics
Taint your horizons and decentralize thought by putting into question where philosophy happens. At PAF, philosophers transit between conceptual practices and situations to embody reason through an abundance of ruses, by amplifying the capacity to think alongside two or more incompatible perspectives at once. With the choice to go against itself and deepen the rifts of eroding neoliberal institutions, Philosophy must discover and explore the dynamics of new conceptual terrain, fractalizing void across a multitude of scales. Following on from last year’s rigorous week, with exceptional thinkers like Reza Negarestani, Nick Land, Lucca Fraser, Amy Ireland, Peter Wolfendale & Mark Fisher, this year's summer university will bring together practitioners and thinkers from contemporary fields of research in sexuality and gender studies, non-classical logic and mathematics, and next-wave cybernetics, in order for new contaminations to occur. The event will orient around two vectors. First, an examination of the conceptual histories of sex and cybernetics, suggesting a new thinking of libidinal politics. Second, a reopening of the questions of formalization and contemporary mathematical philosophy. What is it to think today? To let one field of thought be a virus for another. Our aim is not to prescribe in advance a synthesis of these strands, but rather to create a space of collision, making a ‘solid’ and ‘fixed’ notion of the Outside tremble.
Organized by Katrina Burch, Matt Hare, Alina Popa
18 - 24 August - Indigo Dance 2: Choreographic Practice In Bed With Abundance
Indigo Dance 2 explores the imaginary and potential by mingling domestic practice with aesthetic experience, conviviality with critical thinking and invention with desire and curiosity. With its open source and “peer to peer” structure Indigo Dance is a hawk that seeks new practices, concepts, methods and formats in a sharing, supporting and analytical manner. It provides “guns for dances” by building concepts and discourse around what we do. We believe in the aesthetic experience and the changes it can install and so by showing up, insisting and making things possible for each other we are convinced that we can build the softest army.
The second edition like its predecessor, proposes PAF as the setting for an extra luxurious and highly convivial week of rethinking practice, form and expression in dance and choreography. The week is an unfolding of workshops and activities altogether different that ends with a grand festival.
Indigo Dance welcomes you to share your works, thoughts, concepts, methods and practices. The team will invite guests, commission works, propose collaborations and open the mini-bar. A schedule will be prepared ranging from breakfast in the nest, techno telepathy and inner body dance class over cocktail hangout to concept invention and floorwork interviews to be contributed to, disobeyed or strictly followed.
The hyper fest of i-D 2014 gave a glimpse of the dark deep-sea forest that is the territory to be discovered, invented and forgotten this year. The adolescent has grown up yet stays forever curious and rebellious. Lets keep the daring and allowing attitude, enthusiasm and joy undead while allowing new things to surface.
Prepared by Linda Blomqvist, Emma Daniel, Anna Gaïotti, Adriano Wilfert Jensen
25 - 31 August – MEADOW (it’s all writing) - TXT In Contemporary Aesthetic Practices
Writing and text in all its forms is experiencing a meltdown. A meltdown that appears to fertilize and give birth to new relations to and practices – formats are taking on new costumes and losing them. What is a poem in 2015? Emails, transcription, translation, recitation and reading aloud, storytelling, novels, re- and de-formed conversations, ghost and algorithmic writing, song lyrics, text generating apps, OCR, gaming, learning by heart, inscription, genetics, recipes, poetry, poetry and I have a tattoo. It’s all writing and in this digital environment who knows who owns it, the words, the text, the TXT and the rest. This last week of Summer University focuses on writing and text particularly within aesthetic practices independent of expression or dynamic. We are all writers and we use text, in process or as representation, in choreography or cinema, in poetry or law, tweets or novels, social networks and emoticons, calligraphy and instructions. Let’s get together and we will for sure find out what will happen. The week will be loosely organised, emphasising the social and soft forms of exchange, cooking and having a walk. Yet the week implies the preparation for an event - perhaps a pilot to be practiced other places at other moments - that we together will unfold during last days.
Curated by: Mette Edvardsen, Alexandra Napier, Mårten Spångberg
Participants, lecturers, programs etc will be announced closer to the Summer University. PAF is a self-sustained privately run artist centre initiated 2005, located 150 Km north-east of Paris. PAF does not charge for participation and does not engage in a selection process.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
During the Summer University the weekends imply an intensification and we expect guests to visit PAF over weekends. Therefore, during the weekdays participants cook individually or self-organize. During the weekend PAF and its excellent chefs provide three healthy meals per day.
A full week plus weekend, accommodation and food: 170€
Weekend, accommodation and food: 100€
New visitors will further have to become a member of PAF, 12€