Through a discursive and experimental format, Politics of (Dis)Assembling explores forms of assembling as artistic and political interventions. Given the current and ongoing transformation of political spaces of appearance, the series responds to the aesthetic and political quality of assembling today. Politics of (Dis)Assembling acts as a space of gathering and discussion to critically engage with forms of assembling that enable a dynamic state of coming together while moving away from institutional and organizational conventions that are marked by stale protocols and rules. During the forum, invited scholars, artists, and activists, as well as the participants, are invited to an evening of reflection, shared meals and dynamic exchange.

By placing a focus on processes of assembling, several correlated issues come into focus.

Firstly, the notion of solidarity is investigated and understood as a political form; the capacity of assemblies to act as a prefigurative practice that envisions alternative ways of social, political, and cultural gathering is explored. Thus, how do assemblies create alliances and solidarity between different struggles that go beyond spatial and temporal boundaries to reach radical equality? Can this even be achieved? How can art be a call to action and an engine for this?

Furthermore, the series engages with the aesthetics of activist art as it is connected to social movements, asking what role diverse practices of (dis)assembling might play in the context of critical interventions into the aesthetics of space, history, and violence. How might these dynamic strategies advance anti-patriarchal, antiracist and other emancipatory modes of struggle that seek to challenge, expose or even transform hegemonic structures of power embedded in capitalism?

The aesthetic practices in question aim at making other intersubjective relations, futures, and social structures imaginable. As such, they are always in tension with the social reality into which they intervene. In order to be effective, they rely on certain prevailing material structures, symbolic regimes, and aesthetic habits which they simultaneously try to transform.

Politics of (Dis)Assembling Part 2 has two events in two different locations.

The first event on June 29 at 7.30 pm is organized in cooperation with Savvy Contemporary | The laboratory of form-ideas. In addition, both parts will be accompanied by the ON/OFF Collective, who will engage with the spatial structure of the assembly as well as artist Patu, who will document the events through a series of illustrations.

Together with the activist group STOP DEPORTATION CENTER BER! and the interdisciplinary scholar Jennifer Ponce de León, Politics of (Dis)Assembling will address the potential and limitations of antiracist, anticolonial and antipatriarchal practices of (dis)assembling both in the context of the Americas as well as Europe and Germany. How can artistic and activist practices critically intervene into the workings of border regimes? How does the production of counter publics and alternative world-making work in these contexts? Which forms of subjectivation can be observed and facilitated in spaces thus created? The discussion should also ask how struggles in different national contexts can become visible and (potentially) form coalitions as parts of a wider global struggle against racial and patriarchal capitalism.

STOP DEPORTATION CENTER BER! is an antiracist activist group based in Berlin that has formed in resistance to the planned deportation center at the airport of Berlin Schönefeld. From the 1^st until the 6^th of June the group is organizing a protest camp at the site of the deportation center that seeks, in their own words, to “break the silence”, “raise awareness” and “connect movements” by a wide range of political and cultural formats.

Dr. Jennifer Ponce de León is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies and Comparative Literature. Her interdisciplinary scholarship focusses on cultural production and Left movements in the Americas in the 20^th and 21^st centuries and Marxist and anticolonial thought. She is the author of Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War (Duke University Press, 2021), where she analyzes artistic practices linked to recent social movements and struggles in Mexico, Argentina, and the U.S. Her current projects include the book manuscript “Revolutionizing Aesthetics,” co-authored with Gabriel Rockhill, which deals with Marxist aesthetics, the cultural apparatus, and socialist art from the Americas and Europe. Jennifer is Associate Director of the Critical Theory Workshop.

The second event on June 30 is created as a workshop:

Moderated by Luise Willer.

Politics of (Dis)Assembling is designed and organized by Naomi Boyce, Sambojang Ceesay, Judith Henrike Pieper, Lena Pozdnyakova, João Gabriel Rizek, Luise Willer, Felix Werfel, with support from Jannika Hinz and Tobias Yale Rosen.