ASA is an association which puts her concentration on PERFORMANCE ART. It started in the year 1978, when Boris Nieslony, head of ASA, began to organize meetings of different artist, independent organizers, artist-run-spaces-holders and organizers of alternative and parallel cultural projects. One of the main activities of ASA is the organisation and development of so-called performance-conferences.

The first meeting and manifesting of the idea of a performance-conference took place in 1995 in Köln, and was primary a meeting of artists from Cologne with some guests from Germany. But the idea was to open this conference to whole Europe. In addition to this conferences which includes both practical and theoretical aspects of performance and performance art, ASA focuses its work on documentation of these meetings and all the other events which are taking place in the culture of performance - also because of a lack of documentation of this very lively but marginally noticed art. Another focus is the description of the growing performance network, and the growing itself. So the next meeting was already a cooperation between the performance-index/Basel and performance-festival in Nové Zámky/Slovakia held at the same time at different places with connection online.

Since 1995 until now ASA organised twelve conferences – the last one in December 2003 in Basel, where the attention was directed to performance of women. The first idea of an archive to collect all the documents of this meetings and activities was a transportable, mobile container, which should be taken along, from event to event, from meeting to meeting as a kind of living archive – a battery of crystallized energy. The Black Kit was born: a generator of thoughts, an archive and a sculpture of public interests. This was already in 1981 at the meeting called “The Council”. After years and years of collecting this Black Kit was given to the Seedamm-Cultur-Centre in Swiss as one of the first permanently public archives about performance art, life-events, life based art, the movement of artist run spaces, alternative spaces or alternative projects in Europe.

ASA produces each year one issue of the internet magazine slaps-banks-plots. On the websites of www.asa.de you can find texts and statements by artists, selected writings from performance-theory by performance artists and texts by theoretical or critical writers. It is a forum for contextual discussions and information. There you also find the performance-art-context – a diagram which shows performative approaches in art and science exemplary on performance art, an unequalled fantastic result of an interdisciplinary cooperation.

At last ASA is the basic bureau for the E.P.I. Zentrum, which is "therefore ... an always nomadic 'moving place' resp. a 'place of movement'. That means also, it is a precipice, a vacancy, a kind of permanent beginning. What E.P.I. Zentrum treats and puts into practice are the tectonic shifts and shocks in today's social and cultural reality, which sometimes could be understood as critical junctions and outlined seismographical. At some day E.P.I Zentrum in its abyss fundament will be probable the time-net-adaquate mode of knowledge, its mediation and transfer, both in a theoretical and practical sense. Because the shocks and tears who appear suddenly in the epi centre, will soon provoke all social areas and cultural fields.... such a disposition and foundation, of course, couldn't confirm the traditional sciences as representative and their paradigm."