How Assemblies Matter: Acts of Social Urgency and Imagination

The Athens Biennale OMONOIA launches in Athens the international participatory project by artist Jenny Marketou: “HOW Assemblies Matter?” at the National Technical University of Athens, on 21-22 October 2016.

International Assembly engages more than 50 participants on social welfare, democracy, structures, actions, alliances and more.

“HOW Assemblies Matter?” explores notions on the apparatus of “assembly”, a practice both ancient and contemporary as much as timely under the current political and social context. The project, initiated in 2014 by Jenny Marketou under the overall theme “Assemblies: Acts of Social Urgency and Imagination”, is an ongoing open project conceived as a social sculpture and constitutes an artistic experiment based on a series of collective actions and research. The Athens chapter is a collaborative investigation with Zafos Xagoraris.  Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s view of action creates “spaces of appearance “ and  Judith Butler’s philosophical reflections on understanding assemblies and her claims about the role of the body in politics the project is conceived as a two day event during which Jenny Marketou turns over the existing amphitheater space to the invited participants and audience from all over the world to host a series of assemblies ,agora-style discussions , performative interventions and pop-up actions using various methodologies ,media and scenarios which elude into new habits of “assembly” and social engagement.  Sharing experiences from real democracy movements and artistic experimentation they came to explore new ways of gathering: collective insights into the materiality, the timing, the agenda, the space, the desires and the catastrophes of people getting together in an assembly.

The project is expected to travel in different countries and initiate local collaborations. The discussions, experiences, performances, actions will be documented in a daily blog and eventually in a film installation and a publication by Naked Punch  exploring the notion of “assembly” as a form of artistic engagement. This project is organised in relation to the 5th Athens Biennale OMONOIA.

With the support of Outset Greece.