embedded_vlogger@PAF performing arts forum, France (playlist)

Conversation  with Jan Ritsema, creator and director of PAF Performing Arts Forum. The playlsit also includes a video of  PAF  facilities and a reference to the Public School project.

http://www.pa-f.net/

PAF is based in St Erme, 150km north-east of Paris, France, between Reims and Laon.

PAF (=PerformingArtsForum) is a place for the professional and not-yet professional practitioners and activists in the field of performing arts, visual art, literature, music, new media and internet, theory and cultural production, and scientists who seek to research and determine their own conditions of work. PAF is for people who can motorize their own artistic production and knowledge production not only responding to the opportunities given by the institutional market.

Initiated and run by artists, theoreticians and practitioners themselves, PAF is a user-created, user-innovative informal institution. Neither a production-house and venue, nor a research-center, it is a platform for everyone who wants to expand possibilities and interests in his/her own working practice.

PAF is
– a forum for producing knowledge in critical exchange and ongoing discursive practice
– a place for temporary autonomy and full concentration on work
– a tool-machine where one can work on developing methods, tools and procedures, not necessarily driven toward a product
– a place for experimenting with other than known modes of production and organization of work, e.g. open source production

Most importantly, PAF offers all these possibilities without imposing them. In other words, PAF depends on how you affect and are affected by taking an active part in shaping your own activity in your workplace.