Áron Levente’s Making Public

Introduction

This PhD research is a study in hospitality and what could be called an 'ecstatic literacy'. I explore scores for participatory art and somatic exercises, putting them in conversation with heterodox spiritual practices from the Christian Middle Ages. Special attention is given to the lay communities who engaged in these practices, and the writings they circulated between themselves - often at once poetic and pedagogical. With their help, I wish to come to a literacy wherein one can look upon their body as always ‘ecstatic’ - always extending itself into the world and in/voluntarily inviting the world to extend itself into it. Ecstasy, in this case, is a kind of ‘vital passivity’ that incessantly brings one to new relationships with a world enfleshed. I’m interested in how an artistic practice can become a midwife to the births, lives and deaths of these relationships - if they can be treated as sentient creatures of their own, and the way they challenge the realms of consent and sovereignty. Can we trust our relationships to know something about us that we, ourselves, never will?

Collaborators: Gabriel Widing, Maren Wolf and Rebecca Field
Supervisors: John-Paul Zaccarini, Anne Juren and Erin Manning (2021-2024)
Website of the PhD research

Making Public – Official Program

4 September at Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhuset
Riksdalervägen 2, 12932 Hägersten (metro stop: Hägerstensåsen)

13.00-13.30 – Cafeteria: and welcome by principal supervisor John-Paul Zaccarini

13.30-17.00 – Basement Studio: playing The Unquiet Veil game, hosted by Áron Levente and Gabriel Widing

17.00 – Official end of Making Public. The rest of the Documented Artistic Research Project will go live at https://bones.you/ 

Sign up!
Sign up for the afternoon program on the green ticket botton!
Seats for the afternoon program are very limited! If you missed your spot, you are very welcome to join the follow-up event the same evening (read below)

Follow-up event – Reading Night for “The Mirror of Simple Souls”

The Reading Night is not officially part of the Making Public, but you are very welcome to attend. It is an evening-long program where we read The Mirror of Simple Souls, a mystical text from the French Beguine Marguerite Porete, written sometime at the end of the 1200s. This event follows a series of Reading Nights I’ve been hosting since 2023. You can find some info on its previous iterations here.

20.00-20.30 – Main Hall: Gathering and words of welcome

20.30-00.30 – Reading night for The Mirror of Simple Souls, with live music by Meghan Quinlan, Macumbista and Áron Levente

00.30-01.00 – End of event and wrap-up

Attending the Reading Night is free of charge and requires no registration