Tabula Rasa unfolds in three parts, three Arkanas. Arkana I is represented by The Tower. In tarot, this card is associated with transformation and awakening, a moment of revelation that clears away outdated structures as depicted by the dramatic imagery of a tower being struck by lightning. While these events can be shocking or even chaotic, they ultimately lead to new insights, growth and a stronger foundation.

In the open forum The Tower's Bridge, we investigate the radical potential of establishing a cooperative, collective and collaborative structures in arts institutions. Our guests explore new ways of working collectively, whether in institutions or in artists collectives. The forum is open to everyone to actively participate by sharing their own experiences.

With One Field Fallow, the Bare Minimum collective, Danielle Van Zuijlen and Tim Bryon from Kunsthal Gent, Maryam K. Hedayat (argos / collective of female film directors WANDA / Studio Sarab) and Katia Rossini (argos / Cinema Nova).

The Fool’s Journey workshop is an exploration of how the archive and its imaginative possibilities serve as a form of divination, and how this manifests in our collective consciousness. We will use The Tower, The Empress and The Magician tarot cards as a framework for examining what artistic invention and collaboration can look like outside the restrictions of institutional hierarchies. In most esoteric systems, the major arcana in tarot are a metaphor for The Fool’s Journey - a cosmic invitation from the universe to do away with what we thought we knew. This is what we will ask of you: to rethink the previously unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. The workshop will use somatic interventions, critical fabulation and archival techniques to urge participants to see the archive as an interlocutor, as part of the collective, and consider how we can use the materials of everyday life to transform the mundane into art.

The workshop is conceived and facilitated by Bare Minimum.

schedule

13:00 - 13.30 welcome coffee and tea
13.30 - 15.30 open forum The Tower's Bridge
15.30 - 16:00 break
16:00 - 18:00 workshop The Fool's Journey (carte blanche to Bare Minimum)
18:00 - … drink

about the participants

One Field Fallow, Brussels - Belgium

OFF a queer-run socio-cultural project located at Onderrichtstraat 60, 1000 Brussels. Sprouted from a disused night shop, OFF serves as a workspace for social-artistic research (‘compost’), a neighbourhood laboratory (‘permaculture’), and a meeting point for external individuals, collectives, organisations, and neighbourhood cohesion (‘beehive’). The collective operates horizontally, inspired by the rhythm of the seasons and agricultural cycles. Our work aligns with the logic of the three-field system that circulates between harvesting, sowing and fallowing (rest). The ability to rest and be rewilded is integral to what we intend with this space.

Bare Minimum collective, London - United Kingdom

Bare Minimum is a queer interdisciplinary anti-work art collective. We hate working, hustling, neoliberal self-improvement, wage labour and surplus value, private property, how work eats into our time, our love, and our ability to make things in earnest. We are a group of friends who decided to formally name an existing structure of relation that keeps us alive through our labour for each other. We are lazy, queer and many of us are disabled.

Kunsthal Gent, Ghent - Belgium

Kunsthal Gent is an experimental crossroads for the presentation and development of contemporary art, housed since 2018 in a monumental fourteenth-century Carmelite monastery in the centre of Ghent. During the weekend, Kunsthal Gent is an exhibition space. During the week, it is a workplace for artists and artistic organisations, but also hosts public activities: from lectures and workshops to screenings and performances.