Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato | Assemblages

Art and Media class (Prof. Constanze Ruhm) and PhD in Practice program (Prof. Tom Holert) join to host a two-day event with artist Angela Melitopoulos and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato, focussing on Assemblages , a long-term video project (2010-) on animism, psychoanalysis and the work of Félix Guattari. Entailed by a PhD in Practice seminar on assemblage theory in the wake of Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's writings as well as by a current engagement with psychoanalysis and cinema in the Art and Media class, both screening and workshop may contribute to foster an understanding of aesthetic production and visual research that acknowledges desire, heterogeneity and partial subjectivities.

Thursday, 14.04.2011, 8 p.m.
Screening of Assemblages (2010-), a long-term audiovisual research project on Félix Guattari by Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizo Lazzarato (with discussion in English and French) | Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Lehárgasse 6-8, Atelierhaus/Semperdepot, first floor (Art and Media Class), 1060 Vienna

Friday, 15.04.2011, 2 p.m.
Discussion (in English and French) on Psychoanalysis, Félix Guattari and film with Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizo Lazzarato | Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Schillerplatz 3, DG12 (PhD in Practice/CAK), 1010 Vienna; those who are interested in participating in this workshop are asked to prepare the following texts: Suely Rolnik/Félix Guattari, Micropolitics in Brasil, transl. by Carol Clapshow and Brian Holmes, New York: Semiotext(e), 2008, pp. 265-275, 378-390 (please write an email to t.holert[a]akbild.ac.at if you want to get invited to the dropbox containing pdfs of these texts), and Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato, Machinic  Animism <http://blogs.akbild.ac.at/phdinpractice/gentiliapri.com/images/library/Machnic_Animism__publication_en_s_1.pdf> , in cat. Animism , ed. Anselm Franke, 2010.

I n their 2010 essay "Machinic  Animism" <http://blogs.akbild.ac.at/phdinpractice/gentiliapri.com/images/library/Machnic_Animism__publication_en_s_1.pdf> , Melitopoulos and Lazzarato write:
For every type of machine we will question not only its vital autonomy, which is not an animal, but its singular power of enunciation." [Félix Guattari] Every machinic assemblage (technical, biological, social, etc.), once contained enunciative facilities, if only at the embryonic stage. They thus possessed a proto-subjectivity. There too, like subjectivity, it is necessary to separate the singular power of the enunciation of the subject from the person and the human. This goes against our philosophical and political tradition that since Aristotle has made language and speech a unique and exclusive characteristic of man, the only ani- mal which possesses language and speech.
Guattari, detaching himself completely from structuralism, goes on to elaborate an "enlarged conception of enunciation" which permits the integration of an infinite number of substances of non-human expression like biological, technological, or aesthetic coding or forms of assemblage unique to the socius.
The problem of assembling enunciation would no longer be specific to a semiotic register, but would cross over into expressive heterogeneous matter (extra-linguistic, non-human, biological, technological, aesthetic, etc.). Thus, in "machinic animism," there is not a unique subjectivity embodied by the Western man-male and white-but one of "heterogeneous ontological modes of subjectivity." These partial subjectivities (human and non-human) assume the position of partial enunciators.
Additionally and most importantly, the expansion of enunciation and expression concerns artistic materials which the artist transforms into vectors of subjectivization, in "animist" autopoïétiques  facilities.
"The artist and more generally, aesthetic perception, detaches and de-territorializes a segment of the real in order to make it play the role of partial enunciator. The art confers meaning and alterity to a subgroup of the perceived world. This quasi-animist speaking out on the part of the artwork consequently redrafts subjectivity both of the artist and of his consumer." [Félix Guattari]

Assemblages is an audiovisual research project on Félix Guattari and his revolutionary psychiatric practice, his political activism as well as his ideas concerning ecosophy and interest in animism, especially in the Brazilian and Japanese context.

In Guattari's work and in the same manner as in animist societies, subjectivity loses the transcendent and transcendental status that characterizes the Western paradigm. Guattari's thought and that of animist societies can find common ground in this understanding of subjectivity. Aspects of polysemic, transindividual, and animist subjectivity also characterize the world of childhood, of psychosis, of amorous or political passion and the one of artistic creation.

The project is conceived as a video installation with excerpts from documentaries, essay-films, radio interviews, conversations with friends and colleagues of Guattari, material on the clinic La Borde in France, 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.
Assemblages has been shown in 2010 at the 60th Berlin Internationale Filmfestival and within the exhibition Animism at Kunsthalle Bern, Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen and the Museum of Contemporary Art - M HKA. Subsequent versions will be developed at Generali Foundation in Vienna and the House of World Cultures in Berlin in 2011 and 2012, respectively.

With the participation of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, (anthropologist, Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro), Éric Alliez (philosopher, Paris), Jean Claude Polack (psychiatrist, psycho-analyste, Paris), Barbara Glowczewski (anthropologist, Paris), Peter Pál Pelbart (professor of philosophy , Sao Paolo) Janja Rosangela Araujo (master of Capoeira Angola, professor , Salvador de Bahia), Jean Jacques Lebel, (artist, Paris)

Angela  Melitopoulos <http://gentiliapri.com/artists/angela_melitopoulos/> is based in Berlin. She is an independent artist in the realm of time-based arts. Melitopoulos produces video-essays, installations, documentary films and sound works; she also works as a curator and a teacher.

Maurizio Lazzarato lives and works in Paris. He is an independent sociologist and philosopher, specialized in the relations of work, economy and society. Lazzarato teaches at the University of Paris I and is co-founder and editor of the journal multitudes < http://multitudes.samizdat.net/ > .