The Living School

September 7 – 9, 2021 / 19:00 – 22:00

Art Academy – Møllendalsveien 61, Bergen / with Kim Hankyul, Dóra Ísleifsdóttir, Brandon LaBelle, Nayara Leite, Karen Werner

Opening The Pirate Academy, we focus on the question of the party – parties as creative get-togethers, as anarchic worlding of other scenes that carry with them an inherent sense of excess and the sensual proliferation of felt-experience, a being-with-with. The party is adopted as a base for creative research practice, where revelry is captured as a general method: to delve into the unknown, to collaborate with all sorts of matter, to exhaust oneself in a radical doing. Partying is posed, following Harney and Moten, as a form of study, as what extends the classroom into all types of passionate discovery, where knowledge production is equally anti-production, a breaking-down, non-knowledge, what Georges Bataille calls Happy Tears. Let us cry-laugh! Or what we might think of as the ontological beauty of artistic practice: a continual being-elsewhere.

Tuesday, September 7 / 19:00 – 22:00: introductory thoughts by Brandon LaBelle, on parties, pirates, and other inoperative figures, from the lazy to the hopeful to the distraught – O, the time we have, the time we make… – including the presentation of a new book: “Party Studies vol. 1, on house parties and the making of alternative families” / also, a performative set-up with Kim Hankyul, moving us into the topic of alienation: The Physical Possibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is a work devised as a musical depiction of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Multiple electric motors operated in a preordained sequence will be put together with the casted sculptures of disjointed body parts, performing a music composed under the theme of recurrent physical anxieties in PTSD. By giving a sonic presence to an invisible disorder, the topic of alienation within the range of illnesses is to be interrogated – concluding the evening we’ll screen Jeremy Deller’s Everybody In The Place: Jeremy Deller upturns popular notions of rave and acid house, situating them at the very centre of the seismic social changes that reshaped 1980s Britain.

Wednesday, September 8 / 19:00 – 22:00: collective and explorative reading of Mikhail Bakhtin “On the Carnival” and the upside-down world of the medieval marketplace (feast of fools, the primary clowning inherent to self-organized trade, the scene of public-public life): carnival is posed as an anti-project / as the base for all parties: the original party – plus presentation & radiophonic intervention with Karen Werner: “Japanese radio artist Tetsuo Kogawa speaks about the neighborhood mini-FM radio station as a convivial practice. From February – May 2021, SkottegatenFM was an experiment in convivial radio in the Bergen neighborhood of Nøstet. In this presentation we will ask what constitutes conviviality and how a radio station – whether temporary or long-term, pirate or legal, with a narrow or broad transmission radius – relates to conviviality. What is at stake in the convivial as a way of being together, as a way of making art? We will consider three examples of radio stations: SkottegatenFM, an emergent Bergen Community FM, and a pirate station we will create together.”

Thursday, September 9 / 19:00 – 22:00: we finish the Research Festival with a Costume Party – “the way of the mask” – please feel free to come dressed up or down, we’ll relish the opportunity for playing around / including a performative presentation with Nayara Leite and Kiyoshi Yamamoto, presenting their collaborative work I decided to share my love with you, including textile creations installed in the Nedre Hall. Presented for the first time on the opening of Bergen Pride in June 2021, the goal of the artists was to raise money to Casa Nem, a non-profit organisation that shelters vulnerable queer and trans people in Rio de Janeiro. Every month, Casa Nem shares a list with the basic items they need in order to keep the house functioning and to give its inhabitants the life they deserve. In a country where the life expectancy of a trans person is 35 years old, having a place like Casa Nem brings a little bit of hope to this community – and concluding the evening Prof. Dóra Ísleifsdóttir will share her activities as part of Icelandic Love Corporation, a performative collective working since the 1990s.