Assemblism, Study, 2018-19

The artwork pledge

• QUALITY EDUCATION
• GENDER EQUALITY
• DECENT WORK AND ECONOMIC GROWTH
• REDUCED INEQUALITIES
• CLIMATE ACTION
• LIFE BELOW WATER
• LIFE ON LAND
• PEACE, JUSTICE, AND STRONG INSTITUTIONS
• PARTNERSHIPS FOR THE GOALS

Tags

• Architecture
• Collective Memory
• Collectivism
• Colonialism
• Communism
• Community
• Democracy
• Dystopia
• Environmental Justice
• Europe
• Geopolitics
• Global South
• History
• Ideology
• Installation
• Judith Butler
• Labor
• Performance Art
• Postcolonialism
• Power Structure
• Propaganda
• Social
• The Netherlands
• Utopia
• Video Art
• Works on Paper

About this artwork

Assemblism Studies consist of drawings and sketches that explore the way in which bodies relate to one another in the context of political assembly.

As Judith Butler has written in Towards a Theory of Performative Assembly, people tend to assemble at moments of crises and collectively experienced precarity. They do not necessarily choose to join one another, but they cannot but seek for the presence of others in order to make a collective demand for a livable life. But once gathered – once assembled – new relations and imaginations emerge in the process in which people pre-enact the kind of world they want to see come into being. They become a “people-in-the-making.”

This prefigurative dimension of assembly Staal terms “assemblism,” and in his studies we witness crowds gathering and merging into an architecture of bodies, from which new symbols and collective imaginaries emerge. These drawings characterize the artist’s practice in creating artworks in the form of alternative parliaments and political campaigns, in which collective gathering – assembly – takes a central role.

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