October 25 & 26, 2021 / 19:00 – 22:00
Art Academy – Møllendalsveien 61, Bergen / with Eamon O’Kane, Brandon LaBelle
For the third gathering of The Pirate Academy, we focus on the topic of the Night. What distinguishes the night? Is not the night providing a time and space for other ways of being, acting, gathering? Can we understand the night as the basis for the creative imagination, where the unamable takes form? And where shadows allow for new visions? Following such questions, we’ll reflect upon the night, gathering different perspectives in an attempt to map the nocturnal as a complex zone of uncertainty, pleasure, magic – what Jason Mohaghegh describes as the productive ambiguity of night-life: from altered identity and erotic encounter to criminal behavior and melancholic despair, the night figures a range of irrational, enchanted and transformative acts, where seeing is no longer necessarily believing. Rather, undercover of the dark, other forms of orientation, communication, and knowledge are found, a “black art” which may assist in crafting a creative life. This includes slower, more intimate experiences, where the night becomes essential to forms of rest, intimacy, and doing nothing: questions of sleep, and the right to rest, may be reflected upon, which lead to appreciating the night as what allows us to recover, and where sleeplessness becomes an issue of care and health.
Monday, October 25 / 19:00 – 22:00: introductory thoughts and perspectives by Brandon LaBelle on the Night, from the poetics of shadow to the nocturnal splendor of riotous sociality, from soft hours to monstrous haunting, the night emerges as a world unto itself, and where other worlds emerge: the Night as what shudders the Enlightenment (and our knowledge regimes) by keeping us close to the unfathomable depth of the Natural (and the knowledge of the Witch) //// following these introductory thoughts, we’ll reflect together on experiences of Night: what do we do at night, and how does the night inform our practices as artists? /// we’ll conclude the evening with the screening of the cult “midnight” film The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), which draws out the night into a kitsch sci-fi / horror narrative where alien transvestites from the planet Transsexual work their devilish schemes.
Tuesday, October 26 / 19:00 – 22:00: we continue exploring the night and its qualities with a presentation by Eamon O’Kane /// “The evening hour too gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves.” (Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting: A London Adventure, 1930): In his presentation Prof. O’Kane will explore the nocturnal through discussing texts, paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, and film. He will draw contemporary and historical connections to utopia and the nightmarish at dusk, twilight, night, and dawn. He will point out from his own experience that without the familiar light of day, the world after dark becomes an alien place, a time of insomnia and enchantments, dreams and hauntings, nightmares, and fantasy. Darkness is so intangible that it elicits many subjective responses which can be contradictory and quickly shape shift in nature, the nocturnal can be inviting, isolating, comforting, mysterious, unearthly, magical, terrifying. //// concluding our Pirate gathering, we’ll focus on a consideration of rest, and the night as a time devoted to sleep (and sleeplessness) – what we might think of as the art of rest, and also where doing nothing becomes operative; which includes challenges around finding a place to rest, and the question of home, as well as the bed (the second womb) //// finally, we’ll screen the film “As I was moving ahead occasionally I saw brief glimpses of happiness” (2000) by Jonas Mekas, a beautiful meditation on daily life that manifests an expression of doing nothing, articulating it as an artistic method (inviting us to daydream).
