Assemblages is an audiovisual research project about Félix Guattari and his revolutionary psychiatric practice, his political activism as well as his ideas concerning ecosophy and his interest in animism especially in the Brazilian and Japanese context.
The installation presents excerpts from documentaries, essay-films, radio interviews, conversations with friends and colleagues of Guattari, and material on the clinic La Borde in France and institutional psychotherapy including films by Fernand Deligny, Renaud Victor, François Pain and others, as well as new material produced in Brazil in the course of the research.
Presented as a triptych of differently sized screens, the installation refers to ideas of movement and gravity eminent in the cartographies of animistic art as well as to concepts of the immaterial in Asiatic art. Each screen intensifies a modality of the senses: seeing, hearing, reading. The montage of the archival material is conceived as a mirror to Guattari‘s concept of the ‘assemblage’, which is also a main topic throughout the installation.
The installation is produced on the occasion of the exhibition
Animism, curated by Anselm Franke for Extra City and the MUHKA
in Antwerp.
Angela Melitopoulos, born 1961 in Munich, lives and works in Berlin. She studied fine arts at the Art Academy Düsseldorf with Nam June Paik, is collaborating in political networks in Paris, Italy, Turkey and Germany and teaches in several international academic institutions. From 1985 her work has been shown in international video and film festivals and in exhibitions and museums (Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, Whitney Museum NY).
Maurizio Lazzarato, born in Italy, lives and works in Paris. He is an independent sociologist and philosopher specialized in studies of relationships of work, economy and society. Lazzarato teaches at the University of Paris I. He is co-founder of the magazine multitudes, where he is now on the editorial board.
