SUMMER UNIVERSITY 2013, august 5 - august 15

PAF SUMMER UNIVERSITY 2013 5/8/2013 – 15/8/2013 | PerformingArtsForum, St. Erme, France www.pa-f.net

The «Universities» at PAF are a project initiated in the year 2005 by a number of artists, theoreticians and practitioners during the initial meeting in PAF. The «Summer University» [SU] in August 2012 is the seventh. The «SummerUniversity» is organized in the building in St Erme.

The main interest of SU13 is to experiment with and to test the practices PAF is developing and will develop in future: areas of research, modes (methods, procedures, techniques) of production, frames of collaboration, types of projects, discursive engagement by all interested participants. In a few words: all activities that make up knowledge production in the arts, theory and cultural practice, open and specific.

«University» and participation «University» is the term that replaces «Academy» referring to the Renaissance principle of combining research and education in one location. Secondly, it is called «University» because PAF will be open to all areas of knowledge, even though art is the starting point.
SU11 isn’t an other international summer academy, offering workshops, lectures, panels etc. under a representative topic for which participants apply. The participants of SU13 are at the same time its organizers, in that they are proposing, organizing, and taking part in different projects and activities proposed by themselves. In contrast to existing academies SU13 isn’t based on the principle of «pay to learn and teach to earn». Every participant pays the same fee (the equivalent of food, lodging and technical organization) to take part, no matter what competence or specific knowledge he/she can offer. The access to SU12 is open, but more specifically determined by each project/activity. The aim behind the open access and self-organization is to enable parallel heterogeneous research platforms, to experiment with configurations, extensions, transformations, interferences, mergings and forkings of projects/activities.
Preparation & Programme: Everyone is invited to propose the project or activity he/she would like to organize within SU12. The only limit of choice is the capacity of the house.

During the SU13 we have a cook then, and those days we supply the food (obligatory) 3 meals plus coffee/tea and wine, for 17 euro a day.
This is above the room price of 15 euro per night, so 32 euro a day, during SU12.
Before or after the SU period you only pay the 15 euros per night per person when you stay longer than 5 nights. less than 5 nights the price per person is 17 euro.

From January 2010 on we introduce an obligatory membership of the association PAF for everybody who stays at paf, for security reasons, of a 12 euro membership fee for one full year. This is above the price for the room . Apart from how often one stays at paf one pays only ones per 12 months for the membership.

How to become a participant? It’s as easy as sending an email with or without a proposal to Jan Ritsema: janritsema@mac.com

PAF is an open and relatively free site (and)
PAF is a nomadic space
PAF tries to stay cheap
PAF has almost no staff
(When PAF would have a staff, the prices would be much higher and the highly appreciated autonomy offered to the participants now would be strongly limited. PAF would no longer make a difference but would become a normal well organised artists residency, where space and material belong to the staffs responsbility.)

The highly appreciated autonomy can only be maintained when everybody takes part in the every day maintenance organisation.
In other words: -Don’t leave traces and put things back where you found them.
To be more concrete: - clean up the personal and general dirt you left behind you. - do not colonize space nor information (books, dvd’s etc.), - and keep information, materials, apparatuses and spaces available and moveable.
To say it differently: Make it possible for others, not by retreating, not by withdrawal, or by being modest, on the contrary, making it possible for others is thought as active participation. Through action one offers and opens spaces in which others can take part. One proposes participation in an open rehearsal, a lecture, a conversation, a film or documentary showing and/or by cleaning up and maintaining general space.
In other words: one does. This makes that the doer decides at PAF.