4 in 1: MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, DANCE, CONVERSATION
For almost a decade PAF Summer University has engaged artists, activists and scholars in a ten days’ gathering, sharing and comparing, doing and showing. The intention has been to offer a zone of autonomy where experimentation and recreation could mingle and where knowledge production can be practiced with open doors. The mansion in the French countryside has been an ideal context with its almost endless facilities, studios and nature. Housing up to a hundred artists and offering three meals these ten days has created a unique social and artistic situation.
Artists have created works during Summer University that gained international appreciation, uncountable friendships and collaborations have been initiated during the week in August, ideas have been created, discarded and transformed – not least during nightly conversations or brisk walks through the forest.
At PAF a certain equality is practiced: the doer decides, leave no traces and make it possible for others. Three simple guidelines that have the positive effect of giving space for individual needs and solitary practices as well as spontaneous sharing and opportunities to show and discuss work.
This year the Summer University will inhabit PAF in a slightly different way, extended to four full weeks where each week will be dedicated to an expression, art-form or urgency. Four teams have been brought together in order to energize, curate, rethink, bring together and shape one week each. The weekdays function as a form of open preparation for the weekends that in turn emphasize activities, become a festival, a series of concerts, seminars, where activities are programmed more or less from early morning until late into the night. The teams have been given free hands to design the seven days as they feel fit, gathering artists and scholars, commissioning works, inviting everybody at PAF to share and produce together weeks and weekends that celebrate our practices, giving them new frames to gain visibility, response and momentum.
For the four weekends, PAF offers three meals per day for a fixed price of 100€ including accommodation, starting at Friday lunch and ending with breakfast on Monday morning. During the weekdays the visitors themselves are responsible for food and PAF offers accommodation for the price of 17€ per night (details below). A yearly membership fee of 12€ applies additionally.
This year, PAF Summer University consists of four weeks of activities, more focused but it also offers opportunities to visit this remarkable place for a weekend of both recreation and in-depth participation. For you who are busy with your own project, PAF is of course available for use and sharing.
The teams have been brought together by PAF but are not attached to the organization. From now on we want to test a model where PAF as a structure is centralized but is distributed as an artistic platform and can hosts a multiplicity of initiatives. For Summer University the intention is to establish new teams each year but we also hope that teams can form that will initiate activities during the rest of the year as well.
Summer University 2014 opens with a week of preparation before the first weekend which will focus on music. The following weeks will repeat this structure in different forms: four to five days of preparation for a weekend that will feature showings, seminars, etc. We start with music, to be followed by philosophy and dance and finishing with a week that focuses on conversation.
PROGRAM
The Summer University opens its doors on the 4th of August and our last weekend together will end on the 31st of August.
8 - 10 August — Swimming in Music
After a few days of sharing – through discussions, band practices, playing together or individually, remixing pop with experimental, inviting lecturers, musicians, singers, machines and, hanging out by the pool, initiating a social frame for new forms of listening – the weekend is estimated to be an unimaginable mélange of sound and music. An emphasize will be placed on sound as material in correlation to contemporary philosophy and object oriented ontologies.
Prepared by Yoann Durant, Perrine en Morceaux, Sunna Ardal Rosengren
15 - 17 August — Philosophy: Time, Intelligence, Acceleration
After several years of organizing lecture series with international philosophers, critical theorists, etc., philosophy has developed into a strong current at PAF. Following seminars with Reza Negarestani, Steven Shaviro, Isabelle Stengers, Ben Woodard, Tristan Garcia and others, a team has crystalized that will prepare seven days of intensive studies, lectures, Skype discussions, and writings, next to all kinds of mind expanding practices. Focus will be somewhere between the techno-voluptuous thinking of Nick Land and Reza Negarestani’s later work driven by an obsession with intelligence, technology, cybernetics and time.
Prepared by Amy Ireland, Diana Khamis, Katrina Burch Joosten
22 - 24 August — Indigo Dance: rethinking forms, practice, expression
Dance oscillates between practice and expression, preparation and representation in unique ways. This week will experiment with tweaked, new and alternative ways of dancing, sharing and practicing dance, showing and talking about and with dance. Unlike other artforms, dance hasn’t experienced its emancipation from modern formats and expressions. Perhaps this is the moment when dance is leaving something behind once and for all, opening for an indigo approach where practice and expression, social and performed dance, body and mind mingle differently – and why stop there… Indigo Dance is also a social experiment where the dance studio is no longer disconnected from the kitchen, the disco from the stage and theory is something we dance and practice is a form of love. Including workshops, classes, score practices, baking, commissioned works, a festival, lectures, happy hours and so much indigo.
Prepared by Linda Blomqvist, Emma Daniel, Anna Gaïotti, Adriano Wilfert Jensen
29 - 31 August — The Chinese Export Association
After three weekends focusing on expression, the final week will emphasize differentiated social frames where forms of conversation is brought to the fore. The entire week will be dedicated to open experimentation with non-linear social exchange. The group will investigate the position of the social in contemporary society, the condition of its co-option, how its recreational character today often turns into work and how it connects with notions such as technologies of the self. What happened with a non-disclosed concept of conversation and its particular address to time two decades after relational aesthetics? Can artistic practices today avoid engaging the social neither as socially engaged or engaging in the social but address certain social configurations as material and productive in themselves? Social configurations that aren’t about what is being said but how bodily proximity, spiritual connections and emotive intermingling open for domains of thought that are indifferent to production, interpretation, consolidation and identity.
Prepared by Jan Ritsema, Zoe Poluch, Mårten Spångberg, Christian Töpfner,
Each of the weeks will, after this general announcement, take on their own forms of distribution. Further information will be available through pa-f.net where different events, special calls, workshops, guests etc. will be announced.
PAF is looking forward to a new edition of the Summer University, to new form of creating, reflecting and discussing and most of all to see you here.
Practical Info: Weekends, Friday lunch - Monday breakfast, 100 euro, including accommodation, food and wine.
Weekdays, Monday lunch - Friday breakfast, 17 euro per night, accommodation, individual cooking.
Membership, 12 euro, valid 12 months.
CONTACT: Jan Ritsema or Valentina Desideri - contactpaf@gmail.com