Adrian Piper - The APRA Foundation Berlin

The APRA Foundation Berlin

Adrian Piper founded the Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA) in 2002, after being diagnosed with a chronic, progressive, and incurable medical condition. Although the condition had vanished within two years after she emigrated to Germany in 2005, she continued to develop APRA as a personal and public resource for students, scholars, curators, collectors, writers, and members of the general public who have a constructive curiosity or scholarly or professional interest in her work and life.

APRA is maintained as a document of Piper's activities in her three chosen areas of specialization: art, philosophy and yoga. It comprises (1) the archive, housing Piper’s art work, correspondence, manuscripts, documents, family photo and letters archive; book, catalogue and articles library; video and soundwork library; reproductions library; Vedic and Western philosophy library; art library, fiction and poetry library, music collection, video collection; artwork inventory, text inventory; and, eventually, preserved personal living and working space, furnishings, and personal possessions exactly as she designed, built and arranged and/or used them; and (2) the APRA web site, offering professional and biographical information about Piper’s life and work.

In 2009 Piper established APRA as a foundation that also funds the APRA Foundation Multi-Disciplinary Fellowship, a single, annual competitive research grant designed for intellectuals who (i) are proven high achievers in at least two seemingly disparate fields of scholarship and/or the arts simultaneously; and (ii) wish to use APRA’s resources to research the conception, constitution and/or structure of the self in either or both of them. Thus the APRA Foundation Berlin supports research that exemplifies, models, analyzes, and/or theorizes the same creative multi-disciplinary expressions of the self, encouraged by globalization and cross-cultural journeying, that her own work also embodies. The Fellowship picks up where Rationality and the Structure of the Self leaves off. It aims to extend and encourage further investigation into the same broad family of concepts and theories that Piper’s own research in philosophy and art engages. Its goal is to identify the constructive influence of cross-culturation and globalization on the development of divergent modes of creative self-expression; and to illuminate how these, in turn, help one to adapt to and flourish in that panoply of divergent cultures.