Gesellschaftsspiele. The Art of Assembly

A series of lectures and conversations on the potential of gatherings in art, activism and politics
Since 2021
Different venues & online platform

Hosted by Florian Malzacher

With Ahmed Al-Nawas, andcompany&Co., Athena Athanasiou, Marco Baravalle, Merve Bedir, Claire Bishop, Claudia Bosse, Tania Bruguera, Judith Butler, Phil Collins, Jodi Dean, Radha D’Souza, Didier Eribon, Marcelo Expósito, Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius / raumlaborberlin, Isabelle Fremeaux & Jay Jordan, Max Haiven, Satu Herrala, Lisa Ito-Tapang, Edit Kaldor, Wolfgang Kaleck, Oliver Marchart, Markus Miessen, Alia Mossallam, Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Negri, Sibylle Peters, Julia Ramírez-Blanco, Milo Rau, Lady Bitch Ray, Oliver Ressler, Jonas Staal, Nora Sternfeld, The Church of Stop Shopping, Lotte van den Berg, Eva von Redecker, Dana Yahalomi, Ann Liv Young et al.


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