Assemblages

Gentili Apri presents Assemblages, an audiovisual research project by Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato 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)

Archives Tetsuo Kogawa, Suely Rolnik, François Pain, Institut Auiovisuel Parism ISKRA Paris and others

Angela Melitopoulos, Maurizio Lazzarato
Assemblages