Alive to the passions of this precious gathering
“I must interrupt to say that ‘X’ is what exists inside me. ‘X’ – I bathe in that this. It’s unpronounceable. All I do not know is in ‘X’.” – Clarice Lispector, Áqua Viva
As we returned to presencial teaching in the fall of 2021 at the Bergen Art Academy, I felt compelled to try something different, to bring energy to inventing a new framework or way of approaching the work of teaching, one that would stimulate new forms of learning as well as to celebrate the very fact of being together again. The Pirate Academy was conceptualized along these lines. From the start, its very naming was grounded in a pedagogical imaginary, suggesting a type of parallel structure or world smuggled into the institution. Launching the Pirate Academy was literally to embark on an adventure, provoking an alternative position for both teachers and students, and in terms of what learning could be about. To confess, I have always understood the framework of education as one of adventure: an adventure in doing and thinking, of engaging with topics and issues, and each other, where the grasping of knowledge forms the basis for something more – this more which I would like to designate under the term or figure of X. X marks the pedagogical or educational scene as one of experimentation, an eXperimental undertaking that opens itself to individual, localized desires, struggles and fantasies, alongside that of worldly realities and issues. In doing so, the educational scene is embraced as that which eXcites the imagination, contamination, transformation. As such, X names (without naming) a position of radical hospitality, one that invites or aims for a polylogical intrusion in which notions of critical consciousness are grounded (or let loose) by the fact of heterogeneity – following Julia Kristeva’s ideas of subjectivity as a body-in-process. X is therefore always on the side of bodiliness, and eXcess – this X that “exists inside me” and that Clarice Lispector further describes as that which “vibrates without melody”. Such vibrational, polylogical Xing figures the educational scene as one of eXhaustion, where thinking never stops, doing never completes itself, and ideas circulate along a course of endless proliferation: a germination, a spreading. As such, X also signals (as well as celebrates) the fact of not defining beforehand a final outcome (it may in fact signal a dead-end, a do-not-X warding off any instrumental policy, this X which states: no applications allowed). Experimentality as an educational attitude puts itself on hold, staggering curriculum with adventurous undertaking, a festivity that funkifies the critical (and crucial) mix that is knowledge.
Between September 2021 and May 2022 a series of seven sessions of The Pirate Academy were organized, which moved across the themes of Party Studies, Second Culture, The Night, Common Space, Love, Dance, and Conviviality. The sessions invited the participation of a range of guests as well, including Kim Hankyul, Nayara Leite, Dóra Ísleifsdóttir, Sara Gebran, Karen Werner, Emilie Wright, Audrey Hurd, Marianna Dobkowska, Kristoffer Jul-Larsen, Gentian Meikleham, Adam Kraft, Anäis Florin, Mark Fell & Jan Hendrickse, Joy Forum and Eamon O’Kane. In addition, the artist Sveinung Unneland contributed an ongoing addition by way of his Kitchen Sculpture, a mobile kitchen that became integral to nurturing a social and convivial atmosphere throughout the gatherings. Each session operated as an open yet focused activity onto the given topics, moving across presentational and performative formats, as well as creative exercises and group activities, not to mention just hanging out and talking. It was important to mobilize a conceptual path, a discursive-material-thinking around a set of critical-creative terms, so as to capture a range of perspectives that could support how we approach artistic activities. It was also important to search for moments where everyone who gathered together could engage in more open sharing, where views could be explored, emotions and feelings articulated, and conversations could follow a free course, winding by way of an ongoing act of discovering along the way.
In posing the Pirate Academy as an eXucational scene, I was additionally interested to mobilize artistic research as a generative, excessive proposition in itself, making it more accessible to students across the BA and MA levels by putting it on the move, posing research more as a milieu than a project. This took shape through an embodied positionality, a type of dance-form in which ideas are embraced as partners, a dancing-with-discourse that is less performative and more conductive in terms of setting things in motion and keeping them going. Rather than position artistic research as a statement of intent, even a concerted action, it was instead understood as a passion. This might be akin to notions of gesture posed by Giorgio Agamben, where gesture acts to subvert or withdraw from the operative force of productive work. In opposition to the directive of projects, as what puts one to work and aligns one with a quantifiable, instrumental output, as well as systems of capital accumulation (the hoarding of a certain “cultural capital” often shaping artistic activity today), gesture relishes itself as pure means (and which I’d further highlight as a giving away). A pirate methodology, and by extension, a pirate pedagogy, is envisioned as one of pure means, a gestural mode shaped by festivity, the celebratory joy of nothing but itself and what may arise from within such a scene, amongst friends and colleagues, strangers and friends of friends. This is not to say that a pirate approach does not search for connections beyond itself, rather, through an intensification of its own gestural pleasures or dance it necessarily destabilizes itself; dancing-with vibrates the scene with a joyous energy that is contagious, invitational, at times despairing, turning the eXucational scene into a party in which the unknown is welcome. The unknown, or the strange, comes to operate as a limit to the familiar and the known, and within the context of pirate methodologies, acts as a horizon of celebration – that is, the strange is always already a friend, a collaborator, a guide, and a potential dance-partner. In fact, pirate methodologies aim for a position of estrangement, to perpetually differentiate itself and what it understands itself to be.
This found a type of eXpression by organizing each session of the Pirate Academy as a three-night research festival loosely structured around the particular topics. By conceiving the sessions as research festivals or parties, as sXenes of delirium, the very act of gathering became the basis for understanding research as something one does not do, but rather that one undergoes, or goes through. From listening and drinking, talking in the dark or cooking together, to moving in a space and lying on the floor, research-eXucation is cast along the lines of a positive-negativity, one that upsets (or shimmers as Anastasia A Khodyreva might say) socialization and symbolic ordering in favor of expenditure, joy, a giving away.
Here, research is understood as a movement, a material or embodied undergoing that is no less involved in thinking and reflecting, pulling language into itself and intervening onto or withdrawing from given regimes of discourse – a storying that goes where it must. The research festival as a construct thus captures a sense for knowledge production as a production against itself, as a non-productive thing, a knowing too much and too little at the same time. In this sense, research is always a question of the body: of bodies as material and psychic agents, where knowing is suffused with not-knowing, with the generative and interruptive force of unconscious drives and the (erotic) commingling of the thoughts-feelings of each other. Xing the field of research is to finally bring knowledge production back in touch with the repressed, the silences that speak otherwise, and that find their way, via artistic research, back into what counts as the work of logic. Am I going too far? – I hope so. Going too far is precisely where artistic research starts, because it takes liberties with what counts as science, having been given the tools to run amok in the house of the master. Pirates? Absolutely.
It was important from the start that the Pirate Academy sessions act as journeys, because something happens when we gather together, and gather again the next night, and the next; something happens at festivals, at parties, a kind of durational suspension or concert unfolds, where each is invited and asked to participate fully, to carry the energy over the course of days and nights, and in doing so, to figure the event into a form of inhabitation, a way of living. We live together over the course of the festival, temporally figuring (or prefiguring) a world that also requires maintenance, care, responsibility, a hanging on. Here, the Pirate Academy conceived itself as an act of squatting: a squatting of the institution through an imaginative-material occupation of its spaces, acting as a zone of eXperimental doing – a jamming one contributes to and undergoes with – that also squats the terms of knowledge production, an undergoing that exceeds itself precisely as a way of fulfilling what artistic research suggests, that of funkifying science, dubbing and over-dubbing its terms and methods by way of an exhausted criticality – a poetics that never stops, that is already elsewhere. To piratize knowledge is to exceed production in favor of living otherwise, a manner of style that always finds ways of undergoing something more, Xing the forms and formats, methods and media by which projects are posed and pursued.
From experimenting with party habits as the basis for prolonging the joys of an erotic togetherness, or discussing histories of squatting in the city of Bergen, to dancing as a way of rhythmitizing a relation to the surrounding institution and its systems, or occupying the night as a time-space of occluded and eclipsed subjectivity, a trance-based knowing of things, piracy emerged as the basis for Xing education and funkifying the arts – that is, breaking the beat that puts us into certain grooves so as to prolong disobedience as the art of art.
- Brandon LaBelle