Spaces as Tools

PAF the self-organised Performing Arts Forum in St. Erme, France herbst. This years festival will premiere PAF-founder Jan Ritsemas Shakespeares As You Like It, A Body Part, a production that not only brings together some of PAFs principles. Elke Van Campenhout contextualises a unique space for working and thinking.
One lonely dancer lies meditating on the grass, a challenging philosophical treatise opened on page 213 next to him. From the open windows of the nearby room the sound of a theatre rehearsal, eerily repetitive, its harshness clashing with the idyllic surroundings. The peacocks look through the window of the corner studio at a yoga session. A group of American runaway brides (with tting gowns) returns from a work session in the nearby woods, their conversations incomprehensible to the uninitiated onlooker. And in every corridor, every time you enter the kitchen, two or more people are discussing politics, the arts, food, practicalities, planning parties, the evening lm program, or inviting the others to their showings or work. Not the most typical PAF-day maybe, but surely a possible one. PAF stands for Performing Arts Forum: a former convent reoriented towards artists, actionists and thinkers in the French Champagne. The 6400 square-foot building was bought by the Dutch theatre maker Jan Ritsema in October 2005, and has since then functioned as an open space for artists and theoreticians from all over the world. On its website, the place presents itself as: - a forum for producing knowledge in critical exchange and ongoing discursive practice - a place for temporary autonomy and full concentration on work - a tool-machine where one can work on developing methods, tools and procedures, not necessarily driven towards a product

Fotos: PAF

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- a place for experimenting with other than known modes of production and organisation of work, e.g. open source production. Since its creation the concept of PAF has been supported, used and developed by a wide group of artists such as Xavier Le Roy, Mette Ingvartsen, Eszter Salamon, Bojana Cveji, Alice Chauchat, Jerme Bel, and many more. Many of them have been presenting at steirischer herbst, carrying with them, in their aesthetics and politics, the ideas that are most prominently guiding the PAF scene.

THE MALAISE OF A GENERATION

In a way the self-description above echoes the concerns of the performing arts scene in the past ten years, which has little by little found itself squeezed between governmental compartmentation (through often ill-tting and politically-motivated subsidy systems) and the seductive call of the enterprise-funded creative industries, paving the way for an understanding of the artist as either a well-prepared and policyaware dossier-writer, or a self-proclaimed entrepreneur totally in line with the neoliberal ethics of self-realisation, mobility and economic common sense. Countless artists have expressed the need and the urgency to escape these corsets of survival by pointing out their toxic byproducts: the subsidy system in the wellfounded European scene has started to create a way of working and an aesthetic that is not primarily based on artistic choice and necessity, but on the possibilities of touring (and reaching your minimum quota of presentations), networking (getting as many as possible prominent arts centres to back up your project), and formatting (ideally a performance should t as many venues as possible, not be too costly, and be adaptable to the regular programming strategies of the eld). The kind of work that escapes these constraints is often overlooked or doesnt nd its way into the regular programmation. Now, it is not the case that in the past twenty years nothing has been done to accommodate this malaise in the arts. The (European) subsidiary system for example, has invested a lot of resources

in the creation of residency spaces, laboratory situations, exchange programs and learning environments that should ll the gap between the artists needs and the governmental policies. On a large scale, networking and exchange between artists from dierent countries has been promoted, festivals have echoed the concerns of the neo-liberalisation of the arts, etc. But in the end, the last word was and is still given to the subsidiser: the one who pays decides. And however close the bureaucratised commissions, juries, cabinets and programmers might come to an understanding of the arts, their strategies and ideologies will always be primarily oriented towards the survival and sustainability of the institution, on

the uniformisation of the eld (to make it more ecient and manageable), and on the transparent and seductive promotalk demanded by the communication departments. And, even more importantly, these past years the artistic sector has been cringing under the hot breath of increasingly rightwing-oriented politics. Recently, in the Netherlands, funding for the experimental performance sector was basically eliminated. Portugal, since one year ago, no longer has a Minister of Culture. France is giving reign to a neo-conservative arts ideology, and so forth. And thats not even speaking about the countless countries in the East that often have no budget for the experimental arts scene whatsoever.

ARTISTIC SELF- ORGANISATION AS A WAY OUT OF THE IMPASSE

In answer to all these reserves, artists everywhere in the world have been creating alternative models for the development of their own work; an endeavor that has been tinged by the pull of both the comfort of the subsidised scene, and the self-promoting grandeur of the self-made artist. For a lot of artists it is hard to survive outside the subsidiary system. Moreover, their dependent status is often even structurally enhanced by

the dole regulation, favouring the artists special needs by equalling his practice to a gilded form of unemployment. Artists in the well-to-do-countries of today have grown up with the promise of employment, however badly paid. In Belgium, whole weeks are organised in which the status of the artist rst entering onto the market is discussed. The concern is how to get all these aspiring young creatives working in a eld that seems to be overproducing already. Much like the Swiss cows whose milk production largely surpasses European needs, artists seem to be kept (barely) alive for the wrong reasons. Where the cows are necessary props in the creation of the typical Swiss mountain landscape, the artists kind of

The gravity of PAF

Fluid avoids resistance The uid is easily penetrable and it easily penetrates It does not respect nor has it borders It inltrates It transports and itself The uid, the liquid, is smooth Not straight It is opposite to xed It does not know where it goes It is guided by gravity and follows the possible The uid does not lose time to contest the impossible The uid has no end As gravity is like the rainbow You can never reach it Fluids friend is temperature Temperature helps uid to go up And to cross mountains Whereas gravity follows uid going down Fluid cant get lost To get lost you have to start from somewhere Fluid does not speak the xative But the innite and the everywhere Fluid is beyond the contingent: Beyond the everything and anything can happen, for no reason whatsoever and at any moment, but equally, nothing might ever happen Fluid is metacontingent: It has no choice It can only happen It has no time nor space No imagination It goes and it does PAF celebrates the liquidization, the making smooth of all that is xed, whether these are opinions, characteristics, desires, properties or the private PAF is the place to celebrate being lost PAF makes space for the uncertain And inltrates Be a tool for political action A place where the revolutions come and can be prepared One of these revolutions will be the radical change of institutions we call schools To make schools, like PAF: tools Tools in the hands of students PAF is preparing a european revolution where kids will demand

Or how to be uid

The liquidization of the institution called school A street revolution PAF penetrates It has no choice It can only happen It has no time nor space No imagination It goes and it does

Jan Ritsema is a Dutch theatre maker and founder of PAF Performing Arts Forum in St. Erme, France. His performance Shakespeares As You Like It, A Body Part premieres at this years steirischer herbst.

function as a band aid for the total lack of political resistance and discussion that rules the current political era. So artists have been residency-hopping and networking and realising themselves like the projects they are, no longer only to sell their goods, but to attain the necessary visibility that will get them invited into think tanks, experimental set-ups and laboratories everywhere. However productive these environments might have proved to be, most of these projects come with a price: the working spaces are institutionally tagged, have a limited validation, have to answer to certain expectations and norms. Just like any other sector in society, the arts have to prove their in- and outcomes, their future visions, their unique selling position, and the originality of their discourse. Not unreasonably so, if you follow the logic of the subsidiser. From an artists point of view, however, these discussion groups and projects often dont reach their goal: for economic reasons the working time is often too short, or doesnt answer the needs of those present. Nor do they feel the need to comply with the desire for the clear prole marketing of the institution inviting them. Also, as makers, artists have expressed the need to think of other production systems than the typical career model proposed to the artists in the 1980s. The model of the sole author-artist, inventing his or her own aesthetics, has been replaced by a much more critical and historically-anchored view on how these artists themselves very quickly become commodities in a system that is in constant search for thenew. Artists have started to look for other ways of being together, of producing symbolic capital, of developing discourse that cannot be so easily recuperated and branded by the artistic economy. Mixing up recognisable solo identities, artists have been working under collective names, often changing the belonging to the group underway, or working on ongoing research involving very dierent participants at every stage. What they put into question is not so much the value of the artistic gesture, but the ownership over the material, the ideas, the producing and creation of the artistic material. Whereas the practice of the sole self-created artist was largely concerned with the uniqueness of his production,

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COMMONALITY VS. COMMUNITY

To distinguish the community from the commonality, I propose to talk about community as a group that is bounded to a shared value system on the grounds of a recognisable idea system on which the members of the community agree (or choose to disagree). A community in that sense is based on an initial agreement, however imsy, and with that agreement comes the appropriation of the individuals contributions, placing them under the banner of a shared territory. In that sense the community is settled, no longer in motion, but as any closed system, in constant dialogue with the outside world. In contrast and in accordance with this understanding of community I would like to place the sense of commonality. Not based on territory, commonality has to be understood as a process, as the forming of temporary localities, as a movement on the way to another one. In this context value is not created on the basis of a common belief, but can only be relative to the situation and what is happening in it. Value in this sense cannot be recuperated in this temporary zone; it can only be negotiated through the handling of the objects, through the creation of eeting situations, through the (unspoken) communal debate. Value is, in other words, not dependent on ideological agreement, but can only be understood as practice value: whatever enhances the

creating his value on the artist market on the basis of scarcity, newness and shockvalue, the artists discussed in this text are rather concerned with the practices of sharing, of questioning themselves as the centre of gravity, of relating to other (historical, political, economic, discourse) realities. In these contexts, the practice becomes as important as the outcome, the way of organising the work as important as the work itself, the way of dealing with collaborators a signicant part of the trajectory leading up (or not) to a public moment. But for this to become a viable artistic practice, another kind of space has to be created: spaces that are no longer governed by subsidy policies or economic (un) common sense, but by artists themselves. Places that are not under the reign of proling and networking, not dubbed as subsidiary placeholders for artistic merit, but simply places to work, that take into account the simple but pressing needs of the artists and thinkers concerned.

THE NEED FOR FLEXIBLE COLLABORATION

It is important to focus more closely on this need for exible collaboration, which seems to encompass a lot of artists projects in the last decades. In many discussions, these notions have been put into question: What is the common ground explored here? What is to be shared and in what form? What is the underlying logic of the space? etc

I would like to use another example to elaborate on these notions: A temporary space called The Settlement, that was created by the visual artist Vladimir Miller, who in collaboration with the choreographer Philipp Gehmacher was twice guest at steirischer herbst. As PAF describes itself as a tool, The Settlement as well functions not so much as a metaphoric space mirroring society, nor as an artistic project to be realised through collaboration, but simply as a protospace: an open space lled with non-functional materials, used as a workspace by an unlimited group of people during a three week period. The participants of this group could rearrange the materials to their own content, and adapt the space every day to the needs of their personal projects. What resulted was a space in constant transition; moments of clarity, of crystallisation of function or meaning dissolving into new constructions over the days, charging the space with everchanging points of focus of attention and activity. What was shared in this settlement was thus not an idea of a theme or a goal, nor a drive for the creation of spaces for sociality, but simply the need to work and be. In other words, instead of a group of people gathering around a project and a shared belief about what this project could be or lead to, their only stronghood was an idea of commonality: a mentality of being together, always on the verge of crystallising into a contemporary self-understood community, but always dissolving before a shared understanding and identity was achieved.

practice and makes it move is valuable for the commonality. Therefore the politics of The Settlement is a politics of circulation, of knowledge and ideas moving from locality to locality, often separated from their original creators, picked up by someone else and left behind again for someone else to nd, interpret and restart with. Also relating to PAF, this rephrasing of a space as a tool, as a temporary locality for people to move through, work with and reinterpret, is valid. Although radically dierent in scale and scope, The Settlement and PAF have the following in common: They undo the strings attached to artist workspaces as they are mostly understood. The building is both an instrument and a project in itself; whatever you get out of it, you somehow give back to the space, charging it with renewed perspectives and ideas. PAF only has three rules that have to be followed by all residents: 1. Dont leave traces 2. Make it possible for others 3. The do-er decides In other words: all residents somehow share a common understanding of the building as an instrument for the development of

their personal practice, but every one of them can develop another perspective on what that means. But at the same time, the building is not a silent partner: it is a resistant object that carries a lot of traces of former use, not always literally materialised, but certainly abundant in the atmosphere, the kind of discussions that prevail, the working attitude, the library, the books sold etc As a privately-owned initiative, PAF does carry the stamp of its owner, the critical attitude induced by his presence and legacy. But its sheer size (50 rooms, 15 working spaces) makes any kind of controlled discourse or practice impossible. The uniqueness of PAF probably lies exactly there: that the size and the potential of it gets picked up simultaneously by very dierent groups of people, which makes it at the same time ungovernable and inspiring. The diverse uses of time (longtime residents mixing with hazardous weekend hoppers), space (the same studio used for performing, midnight dinners, exorcisms and political discussions), and exchange (everything from the lone wolf to the societal preacher), keep the space from closing up, from becoming a territory

with a recognisable and forbidding identity. Although three times a year PAF organises communal activities (the SummerUniversity, WinterUpdateMeeting and SpringMeeting) for more or less restricted participants, even those gatherings are proposed rather as a space for re-thinking and re-arranging than as moments of passing on the candle to the next generation. Also at these moments, the dierent temporalities become clear within the unlimited body of potential residents: some struggling with questions that have been circulating for years already, others looking for a way forward, thus stretching up the current moment towards past and future; digging up the remains of former discussions for redigestion while planting new seeds at the dinner table.
Elke Van Campenhout is a Belgian artistic researcher and writer. She coordinates the artistic research program a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) in Antwerp. She works also as a free-lance writer for magazines and as a dramaturge for research projects in Europe and beyond.

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