In the framework of Kunstinstituut Melly (fka Witte de With)’s Curatorial Fellowship in 2017, Council initiated Assemblies with a talk.

An assembly practices the art of gathering people in order to decide how to act for themselves and for those they represent. Assemblies are common to different cultures around the world and are practiced at different levels of society – family, trade union, state, militant group, business, and religious community. They are situations of collective intelligence that embody, perform and experiment the political (mis)representation of the people concerned, their stakes and the issues they are affected by. Rooted in social and institutional structure, each assembly animates an ecosystem of knowledge production, stages power relations between its stakeholders, and produces images and actions for the issues they deal with. Whether their elaborations are driven by progressist or conservative ideals, the forms of assembly are deeply ambivalent: they can either contribute to the reinforcement or to the transformation of social and political order.

Assembly investigates how the way people gather shapes their thinking and actions. The inquiry gathers cases (historical or contemporary, fictional or real) where assembly can be approached as a practice that stimulates critical thinking, political imaginary and production of objectivity as well as the creation of forms of spoken words, architecture and choreography. The many forms of the assembly are investigated here through the means of contemporary culture production, though cross-fertilised with sciences and politically engaged practices. In an attempt to study, compare, experiment and formalize different experiences, protocols and ethics of assembly, Assembly tends to open a space for experimentation in assembly making. This long-term inquiry will become an anthology of the forms of assembly in 2019-20.