It matters that as bodies […] we arrive together in public. As bodies we suffer, we require food and shelter, and as bodies we require one another in dependency and desire. So this is a politics of the public body, the requirements of the body, its movement and its voice. […] We sit and stand and move as the popular will, the one that electoral politics has forgotten and abandoned. But we are here, time and again, persisting, imagining the phrase, ‘we the people’. Judith Butler, Occupy Wall Street, 2011
Whether in Tunis, Cairo, Madrid, Lisbon, in Athens, New York, London or Istanbul, in Tokyo after Fukushima, amidst Niemeyer’s iconic parliamentary architecture in Brasilia, under the umbrellas in Hong Kong, on the streets of Minneapolis: the past decade was marked by political and social movements all over the world. Parallel to this, numerous artistic projects have emerged that use forms of assembly to initiate temporary communities with the specific possibilities of art. They do not simply reflect society, but want to be an active part of its change in very different ways. Theatre in particular has become a stage for assemblies on the fine line between art and reality, a democratic arena of radical imagination.
The series of talks and lectures “Gesellschaftsspiele: The Art of Assembly” invites theorists, activists and artists to report and speculate on the potential of assembly: How can assemblies in art and activism create spaces where radical imagination and pragmatic utopias emerge?
All dates, lectures, videos, podcasts etc. at:
art-of-assembly.net
