The Art of Gathering
27.09 > 01.10.2017
La Bellone, Brussels,  Molenbeek,  Anderlecht

SIGNAL, the meeting place in Brussels to discuss living art in the city, is back at the end of September to explore what brings us together and what makes us move. Us: family, pack, gang, group, clan, community, class or society, we are not the same as soon as we are many.

In order to think and heal the wounds of the City – the recent ones resulting of terrorism, leaving us in a security convalescence, the ones resulting of the social wrench, trying to divide us, the ones of the pollution peaks which spares no districts – the challenge must be taken up commonly, the common being itself one of the biggest challenge.

What do we share in common?
How do we act simultaneously?
How do we gather, together?

Urban Academy
Wednesday 27.09 - 10:00 > 17:30
Thursday 28.09 - 10:00 > 17:30
Friday 29.09 - 10:00 > 17:30
Saturday 30.09 - 10:30 > 12:30

Three days to discuss and research, extended to Saturday morning to make prospective conslusions. This year, the format will be more collective in the morning, led by the activist and journalist Peggy Pierrot. Afternoon workshops will be moments to meet urban artistic practices from elsewhere - this year from Germany, Canada, Finland, Greece, India, Italy and Moldova. 

Special Guests : The Yes Men
Wednesday 27.09 - 20:00

Out of our usual format, in collaboration with Fabrique de théâtre, we will host the American activists Yes Men who will also be leading a workshop of which the result will be presented during the Urban Interventions of SIGNAL, in front of La Bourse, on Saturday afternoon.

IN SITU Space
Since 2016, some of the activities proposed in SIGNAL present practices of certain members of the In SITU platform, network of which CIFAS is part of. Last year we invited PLACCC from Budapest, this year, we have the pleasure to invite Vladimir Us, leading Oberliht at Chisinau (Moldova), and Linda Di Pietro, director of Terni Festival (Italy).

Guests
Vassia A. Vanezi (CY/GR), Eero Yli-Vakkuri (FI), Brigitte Mounier (FR), Mammalian Diving Reflex (CA), Linda Di Pietro (IT), Lotte Lindner and Till Steinbrenner (DE), Vladimir Us (MD), Martina Angelotti (IT), Leandre D’Souza (IN)...


CIFAS is a program in collaboration with the Centre des Arts Scéniques, supported by the Service of the French speaking Government of Brussels, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles and Actiris.
SIGNAL is supported by the City of Brussels, the Finnish Institute, the Art Promotion Centre Finland, Frame Contemporary Art Finland. Organised in collaboration with La Bellone, la Fabrique de Théâtre and Nuit Blanche. With the help of Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Far° (Nyon), Athénée Royal Serge Creuz, Galerie Horta, Ferme du Parc Maximilien, Horse department-Cleaning services and Green spaces of the  Commune de Schaerbeek and Direction of Public Security of Federal Police.

WEDNESDAY 27.09

1/ Workshop led by Vassia A. Vanezi
La Bellone / Studio

Synthesis
Synthesis is a process for creating together a collective/ common artwork and also sharing memories from one’s own childhood house. The first part of these recorded narratives began at Nicosia General Hospital in Cyprus, the second part continued as a project within the project of RickLowe’s Victoria Square at Documenta 14 in Athens, and the third part takes place at SIGNAL Urban Academy in Brussels.It is about coming together, it is about talking and making together, about sharing words and stories together, revealing fears and hopes. It is about gathering. It is about togetherness. It is about human condition.

2/ Workshop led by Leandre D’Souza
Beursschouwburg

Aesthetics v/s Ethics in contemporary art practice: The Ultimate Challenge  
ArtOxygen (ArtO2) is an independent contemporary art organization based out of Mumbai, India, since 2009. They curate, plan and produce art projects which challenge and question the idea of the “public”, in all its meanings and uses. Art02 look at art as a work. Art cannot be static. It must be living, breathing and shaping itself to the spaces that it inhabits and the people that it engages with. One of the most pressing questions Art02 seek to address, crucial to ArtO2’s hypothesis, is: could such a curatorial & artistic approach be the way forward for contemporary art practice? Where a work’s life is determined and stimulated by a complex system of externalities (the site, people occupying it) and where its form remains in a state of ‘openness’? How can we validate such a practice? How can we argue that this is when and where the value of a work truly happens?
Leandre D’Souza is ArtO2’s Director & Curator who will begin the session introducing a few concepts related to its practice-based art projects. This will open into a quiz, where participants are placed into 2 groups in a challenge of questions related to the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in public art practice.  At the end of each question, contestants will be invited to a match that will determine the winning team. Following the challenge, a consolidated map will be prepared as a preliminary documentation of ideas, insights and new trajectories to be explored and expanded.

3/ Workshop led by Eero Yli-Vakkuri & Pietari Kylmälä
La Bellone / Courtyard

Trans-Horse
Trans-Horse workshops for Signal aim to discover contemporary alliances with animals. The majority of European cities have been build with the help of horses. The more developed we imagine ourselves to be, the more challenging the presence of animals has become. Instead of seeing horses as remnants of the past we should reach out to them as specialists in sustainable design. The workshops are hosted in collaboration with the Belgian Mounted Police. The police will give a detailed description of their work and share some of the tools they use. Their presentation is supported with light physical exercises, an overview of our history with horses and an analysis on challenges horses impose on concepts of modernity, efficiency and development.

THURSDAY 28.09

1/ Workshop led by Till Steinbrenner & Lotte Lindner
La Bellone / Courtyard

To Act Site-Specific
We always act site-specific as sites produce specific behaviours or ways of acting. But could specific ways of acting also change sites or even create them? To what extent does this apply to shared public space?
In our own work we first intensively analyse given public spaces as well as art-institutions like museums and galleries. History, stories, architecture, the social movements of people and their rituals, their expectations and rules… all this interweaves to what we perceive as a site. And we ask: does it have to be that way? Would this be conceivable differently? Can we induce people, subtly or offensively, to act in different ways or to perceive differently? What happens if a thing flees our sight by means of its excessive brightness? What happens if the pews of a church turn to Mecca? What happens if a flattering voice courts me at a barren place in urban planning? Is everything that is guarded by a bouncer exciting?
Ranging the city, we want to discover and analyse places and rituals as well as build ones. How does a place influence us and how can we influence a place? And then we want to devise and try out excessive concepts and realistic interventions.

2/ Workshop led by Eva Verity
La Bellone / Studio

No awkwardness, no allies
In this workshop, Eva Verity will share some of the company’s social practice work, and how the company utilizes awkwardness and temporary discomfort as a tool for generating connection and trust-building with collaborators who don’t know one-another. Attendees will participate in interactive exercises and games that put ‘social acupuncture’ into action, and demonstrate that a little awkwardness can go a long way toward stimulating intimacy and engagement.

3/ Workshop led by Linda Di Pietro
Beursschouwburg

Come Close - Practices of commonalities and co-creation
In 2016, the Ternifestival invited 4 artists to a residency within the project called ‘Foresta’. For this residency, Leonardo Delogu, Michele di Stefano, Friso Wiersum, Veridiana Zurita were asked to observe from an inspiring point of view a city (Terni) in transition and a festival questioning itself in regards to their territory. Aimed at rethinking the role of a festival in a city, and the role of artists in the making of a festival, their proposal to the festival direction was to co-create a program. Cultural institutions and festivals face complex changes and are rethinking constantly their relationships with artists and audiences.
Come close is an invitation, a prayer, and an advice.
The idea of shared decision-making was to give voice and be responsive to the needs and interests of local community members, to provide a place for community engagement and dialogue with artists, to help artists develop skills that support their own individual and community goals.
The workshop, after a presentation of the specific context of the Terni Festival and its realisations, will go through discussions and interactive dispositives highlighting questions of trust and power – which appear in a situation of co-creation between artists and organizers. Is co-creation really possible?

FRIDAY 29.09

1/ Workshop led by Martina Angelotti
Beursschouwburg

ON and around the square
Through an iconographic excursus, this workshop/lecture recounts the role of the square in Bologna, understood as a political and social space crossed by several generations of antagonistic and student movements, and documented in some counter-information medias that have been in place since the mid-1970s. The narration begins in the second half of the 1970s to explore the uses and connotations of the square until recent times, when, in 2007, in Bologna, ON project was activated, setting up its theoretical and art bases in Piazza Verdi. In this chronological genealogy, the focus outlines, through some productions and interventions, how the concept of public space has evolved over the years, not just generating new imaginations and ways of relationship between places and people but also promoting content that takes shape in other spaces and places in the social context.

2/ Workshop led by Brigitte Mounier
La Bellone / Studio

All, together, in the public space
Public space is in essence our common cultural democratic fund.
What happens in the public space today, what it tells us about our past, the multiple ways we can act in it, to transform it for the future, make public space the first free and living encyclopedic library we have at hand.
Taking this as a starting point, Brigitte Mounier will approach the question of gathering in the city by relating it to the history of live entertainment: theatre shares common roots with the exercise of democracy and the occupation of public space; then she will invite participants to share and revisit some tools of participatory democracy and its artistic expression in public space.

3/ Workshop led by Vladimir Us
La Bellone / Courtyard

Shared spaces (space for myself and for meeting the others)
If you had the chance to redesign the urban environment in which you live, how would it look like? How would your private space look like and what kind of public (shared) spaces for interacting with the others would you propose? Lets have a drawing session and imagine a neighbourhood of the future.
Most of us we have grown and developed in carefully planned (mainly urban) environment, without a real possibility to influence the way it is being designed, either with little possibility to change it. In the moments of crisis or during radical change, when the controlling system has failures, people would use this opportunity to take advantage for their own needs, often forgetting about the collective needs.
The workshop aims to provide space for an analysis of the standards in urban planning and architecture formed due to different traditions that appeared under various political and economic regimes, and in various contexts. This has also influenced the type of relations (the intensity and the openness, etc.) that people have developed inside their families, with friends and within the neighbourhoods.Beyond the differences that this activity will encourage us to identify, we shall pay attention to things we might have in common - the need to meet and interact with others being one of those needs.