‘A library of long lived truths. Of millions of experiences, of mistakes and setbacks, of burns and cuts, of saws and iron bullets during the wars, millions of stories, millions of lessons learned the hard way, all materialised into branches and leaves and bark.’ (Gert-Jan Stam, writing session in Pelt, 11 May 2022)
With this text we take a leap off the stage.
Through my work in the performance field (scenography, installation work and curating) my motive has always been to create spaces and situations in which encounters are facilitated. Using the ‘encounter as a dramaturgical tool’ (Groot-Nibbelink, 2019), I have developed a series of artefacts (performative installations) that function as ‘epistemic objects.’ These installations-as-artefacts have the potential to operate as knowledge instruments that help us adopt a post-anthropocentric perspective, in which they work as tools for developing radical interdependence (Escobar, 2018). HALL08 is such an epistemic object. It is part of the long term project HALL33 (2012–2033) which nomadically and iteratively appears as an ever-evolving series of installations/artefacts/sites.
Breg Horemans is a PhD Candidate at KULeuven, Faculty of Architecture and member of the Regenerative Architecture, Arts & Design (RAAD) research group. As an artistic practice-based researcher he co-founded the TAAT collective (with Gert-Jan Stam, 2012), that works on the verge of performance, research, and installation art. Since 2011, he has been renegotiating his relation to the architecture discipline through transdisciplinary collaborations. He holds a post-graduate degree in Curating (ZHdK, 2016) and worked as a curator in Architecture and Urbanism at SCHUNCK in Heerlen (2016–18). As a spatial designer he collaborated with a.o. Eleni Kamma and Lotte van den Berg on projects at Villa Romana in Florence, NAK Aachen, and Stadsschouwburg Rotterdam. The projects initiated by TAAT generate spaces for co-existence and instigate fluid prototyping processes as ‘becoming spaces.’ The desire of his research-based practice lies in shaping the spatial conditions for ‘sites of encounter’ that invite human and non-human entities to co-constitute each other. In the last two years, Horemans has been co-developing the TAAT Live Archive, an online documentation database that enhances processes of open source writing, archiving and publishing. Since 2018 he has been affiliated with KULeuven as a practice-based-lecturer (LAB-O) and collaborates with educational partners at University of the Arts London: HOGENT, Aberystwyth University Wales, and the Technical University of Vilnius. TAAT is structurally supported by SoAP Foundation in Maastricht and the Dutch Performing Arts Fund.
I move between close and distant readings of the artefacts of our collective production and their environmental entanglements. Regenerative Spatial Dramaturgies (my PhD project) is part of a larger regenerative movement in practice based design research (see the statement of the RAAD research group – https://architectuur.kuleuven.be/raad), that explores a fluidly organised and decentralised mode of knowledge production, embracing complexities of ‘intra-actions’ (Barad, 2007) instead of working from reduction and simplification in pursuit of objectified research data. Therefore I develop and implement interpretative research methods like scripting and scoring (and more specifically: auto-narrating, dialogue formats and performance scores) to track interdependencies between the involved human and other-than-human entities in my work.
Meierhans Christophe, A call for artists to leap off the stage (e-tcetera, 2020) https://e-tcetera.be/a-call-to-artiststo-leap-off-the-stage/
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, (Durham: 1993).
Richard Serra, Torqued Ellipses I, II, IV, V, VI (1996–99)
Please read ‘Reparative reading-writing alongside HALL08: the paper1’
