A one-week workshop organised by Julien de Smet, Vanessa Müller and Emptor artist Clémentine Vaultier (Botschaft) in the framework of Nomadic school of arts (KASK & Conservatorium, Ghent) and Radical_House
13 – 16 & 18/09/2022
Open to everyone (last minute enrolling accepted)
A one week camp, taking on satellite perspectives, making scenes, within a play already playing
Spinning PLOT chooses an existing place in Ghent to observe, monitor and learn from ongoing – often irrevocable – processes we are more often passively than actively part of. At the same time this workshop offers the possibility to generate different standalone small format scenes, displaying, and voicing one’s observations and research trajectories.
The workshop is based on the currently evolving participatory street opera PLOT by artist collective PILOOT. Produced this year and to be presented on site on Sep 18th, this opera is the culmination of 7 years of social artistic research and exercises. By introducing and unraveling the works of PILOOT, it will be entering the multilayered artistic practices which developed and are still running around the Tondelier site – a highly gentrified area in the Rabot neighbourhood in Ghent.
As a start, a camp will be set up on site to get a better understanding of the socio-political complex it provides. The programme will involve digging into archive material, inviting the artists currently and formerly engaged with the site on a long-term level, and exchanging artistic ideas in an experimental context. It will also link back to the speculative opera libretto The Orphans of Tar and its characters. This libretto was co-authored by participants and contributors of a previous site-specific workshop in 2019, organised by Vermeir & Heiremans.
Based on the methodology of co-narrating, the workshop will take an outside satellite perspective in order to realize scenes of one’s own. A scene being a moment, in which you make your experience tangible in the medium of your choice. By entering the context, the complex – the PLOT – you step on stage. You are invited to become active in the opera PLOT and explore possible involvements orbiting on present or past trajectories from PILOOT. May it be enacting a character from The Orphans of Tar, enhancing a particular sound, building a prop or engaging with others acting on site.
The aim is for this week to contain encounters between people from different backgrounds. Off campus learning is also an opportunity to engage with people that are not related to the context of an art school. The invitation is thus open to anyone interested to participate in this interdisciplinary and heterogeneous project, hence forming a receptive group settling in a pre-existing PLOT.