Welcome everybody to the 12th edition of the Art of Assembly as part of the School of Resistance and we are very glad we are meeting tonight. Unfortunately, the last two episodes already had to be postponed, hopefully not cancelled further, but postponed because of known reasons and this one is not happening analogue and gant as we planned it, but at least we meet online. So I'm already very thankful for that and I'm very happy to have as guests tonight Isabel Fremont, Jay Jordan, Tasha Wojcik and Milo Rau. And my name is Florian Malzacher and I'm creating and hosting the series The Art of Assembly and maybe just a few sentences for those of you who haven't followed the series. The Art of Assembly is a series by Brut Vienna and me initiated to investigate but also to speculate on the potential of gatherings in art, activism and politics. And we started now pretty much exactly a year ago and if you missed past episodes, I want to check them out on our websites, our videos of the inputs and the lectures and podcasts of the whole edition. And I think we covered quite a wide field of this topic in very different angles. And still this edition is quite a special one, as I said, Art of Assembly is part of the School of Resistance and School of Resistance is part of Art of Assembly tonight, which is a nice twist and I'm really thankful and excited about this collaboration. Since I think there's a certain kinship in our approaches and I think it also makes sense of course very much to link this. So thanks a lot to everybody behind the School of Resistance and also to the team of Antigant for making this possible and hosting this evening. The topic tonight we will talk about is really very much in the center of how the series started, coming from the observation of all these assemblies happening within the art in a time, in a decade, where also assemblies became more widely known, I think, due to all the square occupations, the movements in many parts of the world. And there were practice, of course, much longer, but suddenly there was a different focus on them. So numerous theater makers and artists have been inspired by the concept and the formative reality of assemblies in recent years, creating, directing, initiating trials, parliaments, congresses, summits and assemblies in white cubes and black boxes on proscenium stages, public spaces, etc. But the relationship between theatrical and political representation remains complicated, I guess, so we will talk about it. What are the difference in proximity between physical presence within an art institution and on, for example, an occupied square? So I actually remember when, together with Jona Stahl and Jona Varsha, I was initiating a congress and assembly in 2014, Artist Organizations International, where also Jay and Milo were there as well. There was somebody saying, ah, you have to turn everything into theater. And this was not meant as a compliment, obviously, so it was from a more activist side, saying, okay, basically, you make everything worthless, a reverse meters touch, you make out of it, you make theater out of it, and then it's not useful anymore. Well, I would understand where this is coming from, and I would agree that it makes theater out of things I would still would not consider that personally as necessarily a bad thing, we'll talk about it, but indeed, I guess there's a crucial difference. The activist, often anarchist assembly is often considered a space of authentic negotiation, a space for trying to abolish, establish hierarchies for not only trying but living a different way of decision making. While I guess the assembly in theater might sympathize strongly with those ideas, I would guess it has an essentially different take. Theater is not only a social but always also a self-reflexive practice. Even so, many conventional theater approaches kind of ignore this. I think theater is a paradoxical machine that marks a sphere where things are real and not real at the same time, and it proposes situations and practices that are symbolic and actual advance. It does not enable an artificial outside of pure criticality, but it's also not able to lure its audience into mere immersive identification. So the social spheres, the assemblies, can create, offer the possibilities of partaking and at the same time watching ourselves from outside. So in this regard, one could say that Brecht's alienation effect is actually not an invention, but rather a discovery of what all theater, what constitutes all theater. Just not all theater. That was spectacular. I hope you're still there. So the liveness of this event, just to prove it's life. So what I was saying in a way is quite simple but quite complex, that theater is real and not real, actual and symbolic at the same moment, which produces a paradoxical situation. But I believe, it's not so original in a way because in a way it's a Brechtian thought, it's something that enables this double take of being part of something and at the same time being able to reflect on something. So this construction, I think, is maybe what theater would have to offer in a way and I guess Milo will talk about it and we will talk about different ways about it, but it's also a problem of course, as I said, making theater out of everything and it leads to possible disagreements also there. That's the more aesthetic side of theater. I was talking about a whole other chapter again and we will also talk, I guess, quite a bit about this is the institutions of art. So it's not only art itself, but it's also the institutions that are owning art, disseminating art, organizing art in a certain way and bringing their problems with them, also problems of making it part of the market and certain discourses, etc. So we will talk about some of these things tonight and we will start with Milo Rao, who has obviously initiated an abundance of projects, so it does not really make sense to pin him down only on one strand of it. Anyway, a little bit for tonight would like to do that and focus on your tribunals, trials and assemblies that you have been staging. These works have been quite an inspiration for the series because they are works of art and at the same time want clearly to intervene in the reality that surrounds them. That is their quality, but perhaps it's also their problem in line of what I was saying and that's something we will discuss. Then we move on to Kasia Wojcik, who is one of the persons behind the School of Resistance, which maybe already marks something, so there's not one person to be able to represent it, obviously a different kind of effort. Milo is also part of it, but this we ignore for the moment a little bit and the School of Resistance uses theatrical settings, but understands itself as activist, not as an artistic project. This may be also a slight paradox we will talk about and Kasia, who is a dramaturg, poet and activist, will talk about their work, but also why she believes that art and art institution can actually be useful for activist struggles. Last but not the least, I welcome the activists Isabel Fremont and Jay Jordan from the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination and I guess already the name tells it all by bringing together imagination and insurrection and they live in the Zet in France and you will also talk a bit more about this in the moment or in your contribution and they very clearly and often and very beautiful have stated so believe if you truly want to do politics you have to desert the institutions of art and entangle insurrectionary imagination into the everyday life of movements. So welcome everybody. I will a little bit more introduce everybody before the input. Everybody speaks about 15 minutes. Isabel and Jay have prepared a video and after that we all come together and we'll talk about it. So Milo Rau is not only a theater maker but also filmmaker, sociologist, writer, journalist and before he made his entree into theater he spent years reporting from conflict areas such as northern Iraq and Syria. In 2007 he founded the International Institute of Political Murder which in addition to theatrical productions, films, videos and performances also publishes books and organizes debates on social and political themes and since September 2018 you are the artistic director of NTGENT which is also hosting this evening. Welcome Milo. I'm really happy you are here. Also we were talking actually for almost a year about that you should be part of the series so I'm very happy it works out tonight and the floor is all yours. Thank you Florian. It's a big pleasure to be with you here. Yes it should be in GENT but it doesn't happen in GENT and it will perhaps next time happen in GENT but at least it is co-hosted by us. So I mean what you said in the beginning in your introductory speech is for me quite interesting on how I think we look on assemblies and perhaps I can expand a little bit on that that on the one hand especially we German speaking guys we are very pro-alienation effect and on the other hand we want to overcome the alienation effect so we are always when you are talking about assemblies and what this gathering theater where you look on something that you are enacting in the same time what you exactly are in that moment this is very questionable and this is taken in this dialectics I would say of escape alienation and kind of searching for alienation to step out of the immersion of the I don't know of however we can name it as a wrongly understood life and wrongly did practice. So before I was a war correspondent and the writer and before I then started to theater I started as an organizer of big manifestations in Switzerland for the young socialists and the other question always was how would you bring for example on the 1st of May or when we were protesting against the neoliberalization of the universities or other topics how would you bring together different parties different groups from anarchists to classical trade unionists to one event and how would this event happen and how would this event go through a city and how does it end with speeches and everything I think Kasia you know these problems very well also now when we are doing the first life school of resistance so how is this all organized just a political assembly and later I started doing theater and of course I was experimenting this format in black boxes you were mentioning the trials and the tribunals and this started in I think in 2013 that I did the first trial so it was called the Moscow trials I can come to this because it was the first time I did it a bit by an accident and I will try to understand going through some of these projects in the next 10-12 minutes how can an assembly an aesthetic assembly because it's still theater that's true that's perhaps the difference of what we will hear later in this in this meeting how can it represent reality how can it reflect reality how can it change reality and how can this change of reality be sustainable or can go on when the so-called project art project is finished I think one of the of the big questions of social engaged theater makers so that the Moscow trials happened a bit by accident I would say because I was invited to do a re-enactment of a stylistic trial of the first is I went to Moscow and there I was immersed in the whole scene of activist artists at that time it was a bit before everything was freezed so for example I met Pussy Riot it was before they played in the holy savior cathedral and it was a group and they were just playing here and there like many other artists too in Moscow and but I understood that when I do a trial it shouldn't be a re-enactment of an old trial because I was giving a conference like this one about the trial against Bukharin in 37 and then somebody said but it's exactly the same situation like today but today it's against artists there were two exhibitions that were made in the Sakhov center that were destroyed by right-wing Wendels right-wing extremists and then the strange thing was that not these extremists were put in front of a tribunal but the makers of these you could say more leftist modernist the post-modernist as they say in Russia exhibitions so I decided to remake these two tribunals against these artists and when I was in the middle of doing that this big scandal around Pussy Riot happened and I remember that somebody was telling me Milo this is this is the third one so you should take this one too so Katya she was not sent to the prison one of the Pussy Riot I invited her to and I invited all these artists and and this is what you could call an antagonistic model and their enemies so let's say that the right-wing people the the orthodox people to restage this tribunal but in real life following Russian law inside the Sakhov center where these exhibitions happened that were destroyed and for me that was point one how to bring together these people how to represent this society that only reacts on each other and I constituted a popular jury and the tribunal happened during three days with a lot of you can see that in the film with a lot of little interruption so it was attacked by the Cossacks it was attacked by the by the by the secret service and the outcome was a indubile purée so it was like three to three with one exception so they were liberated and of course this was the first time that I was asking myself I remember in the moment when the jury was retired and I was sitting there with with with Pussy Riot and the other artists and activists and asking myself but what would it mean if the outcome would be the same like in reality what is what would have been possible we did more tribunals in that style one in syria for example in my hometown against the fascist newspaper they won so that's the problem the fascist newspaper won the tribunal and and the third one and this became a new format was the congo tribunal so it's a and it's the first time that I created something that is not only an antagonistic representation of reality or trying to bring whole society together in one room it was creating what we call a symbolic institution so an institution that should exist but doesn't exist at that moment and will stop to exist when a real a real institution will start to to exist so we gathered advocates from congo and from international law advocates together to put on trial the international mining companies so swiss companies companies from canada that are exploiting at that very moment the eastern and the south region of the congo where you can find the biggest resources of of cocaine of cobalt of gold so what they call strategic strategic minerals because they are very important for for example the it it industry and we started in eastern congo to do this tribunal and we went on this tribunal became quite fast independent from us so last time in december I was in in colvesi so the world capital of cobalt to make a tribunal against against glenkor the biggest mining company and at that moment I was only as as part of the the jury so the congo tribunal you could say went completely into the hands of the of the of the house of of congo these advocates and some international advocates so it became an independent institution but still symbolic in the way that an international economic tribunal doesn't exist because there is no law that would be the basis of it also these law we had to to create the interesting thing besides the fact that we could attack enterprises the un the congo lease government and other players that are there is no tribunal where you could attack them was that something super complex like world economy could be brought together in in one room so that's something that always interests me to to have for example a manager of a mining company somebody from a group army from a from an armed group from a from a from a guerrilla somebody from just a worker in the mining industry somebody who was pushed from his earth a little peasant and so on and so on all together in one room to following the law representing world economy in different cases so that was the the congo tribunal it's ongoing we tried to last time we connected it to the to some initiatives in different countries in europe to make these transnational companies accountable in their home countries so we lost the initiative in in switzerland but it's ongoing and we hope that in the next time that there is a vote we can we can push it a bit more and it will it will happen because it was was quite near and but still their sustainability of these kind of projects is quite unstable so i want to come to the last project that for me was super important or perhaps two i have i think three minutes more to the to the revolt of dignity which was based on a on a jesus movie we did in in matthera in south italy what would happen if jesus would come today to the south of italy and the situation there so this capital of culture where we did it according a bit to the film that the italian maker pasolini did 50 years away is is is very absurd so you have this european capital of culture in the round you have the reality of of of south europe so you have 100 000 some even say a million of illegalized migrant workers on the on the tomato fields that are exploited by the big companies by the mafia etc so we tried to connect the making of this film and the creation of a kind of an overall solidarity between the the the the the the workers coming from africa the italian little farmers the trade unionists and all kind of groups to create an overall movement which we depicted in the film as the movement of jesus and the interesting thing is that the outcome of this film were three things so first thing we said who plays in this movie has 10 documents and becomes regularized and becomes citizen of europe so that that's what happened and then we said we want to have what we call a micro ecology so a whole distribution system that now what we did we used the film as a you could say a propaganda tool to sell these tomatoes produced by the cheeses of the film yvonne sanier and and his colleagues his apostles to sell it in 150 independent little shops in in all over europe so what happens is that by this film these people started to produce tomatoes by producing tomatoes they get papers by getting papers they can sell the tomatoes by the money that comes back they can own land and they can produce more tomatoes and it became a kind of a circle an alternative economy you could say that until that moment liberated almost a thousand or regularized almost thousand migrant workers that could step out of the in the film depicted by a system of of of mafia exploitation on the big fields in south of italy the the second example and i think i have one one minute left because it's a bit the new branch we are we are in is the is the what what happened in or is this in musul so i made it as a as a kind of classical theater play as a co-production of the entegent and the fine arts academy of musul so we've actors from musul the former capital of the islamic state and and actors from from belgium and we produced it in musul but it was completely impossible to tour it so the actors of of musul would only be on on on video and i said to myself but that's a bit nonsense after all this collaboration to just go on tour of the play and together with the unesco we could produce or found in this in this time as an outcome of this project the film school in musul and the idea of the film school again is to use you could say the capitalist distribution system of culture to construct cultural infrastructure where you wouldn't expect it to liberate people so what they will do that produce now the nine first films in the film school of musul that we will tour a film festival try to bring in the international circuit and by this refinance the school and produce more films in musul so to produce a parallel system of representation and production of of of of art and i think that's a bit the way i wanted to to describe from representing a situation like russia 2013 changing a situation like it happened in the congo tribunal where ministers were dismissed thanks to the to some of the witnesses of tribunal some of the cases we represented two uh micro ecologies or some also call it micro economies of of a sustainable way of of producing out in another way thank you very much below and you could have had two moments no problem the longest 15 minutes we had so far by 40 i think in the series so if you everybody who stays around 20 is perfectly fine just for the following up thanks a lot we will talk all together about it afterwards as i would now i'd like to introduce kasha voitzig i was not in the image yet but probably will appear in a moment and i will not introduce the school of resistance now because you will do that in your your talk it's a it's a project an initiative by the international institute of political murder and and again and kasha is together with eileen banken martin wildestauber and york blokos senior curator of the school of resistance and she's a dramaturg poet and artist and in this context maybe just in the context of the series also to mention also related to stop to glitzer dealing with the folk screener which we were talking about in october in the 10th edition of the art of assembly and since 2017 you are part of the ii p m and you were a curator of the general assembly which milo now unfortunately left out but we will talk also a bit later about that in 2017 and co-companor for the new gospel in 2020 thanks so much great to have you and the floor is all yours thank you florian okay everybody can hear me i hope it was the birthday of a great teacher this week angela davis and i would like to start this grounded embodied lecture as i call it with a quote by the marxist philosopher and political activist she is you have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world and you have to do it all the time theater is a magical tool i do believe one can say that new forms of political interventionist theater that create reality and change reality by connecting reality are emerging and i find it quite beautiful the chile and colectivo las tessis that was also guest in our school of resistance with their performance violador eres tu spread like a wild fire over the whole globe sparking the imagination of a global collective inspired by the radical revolutions happening on the streets in chile in autumn 2019 we could connect all of this if we want to to the history of interventionist art over the last 100 years the russian avant-garde with people like nicolei evrenov during the russian revolution but also action art created in the 1960s and i think our school of resistance is just situated in this very complex but interwoven net of activists but also artistic practices and methodologies school of resistance started in may 2020 as a joint project as i was said by iapm and the antigens right after the outbreak of the pandemic with the online speech of the indigenous artist and activist k sara the green of the brazilian forest behind her and she sent out an urgent message to everybody listening that this planet is on fire some days ago the close friend of a very dearly loved person was murdered in columbia albeiro camayo another indigenous leader on the latin american continent defending his community and mother earth that he and his community are so dearly connected to in the last centuries i would say we live in accelerated times and we live in compromised times what started as an online debate series has in the meantime grown into a multidisciplinary multi-visioning and visioning day event in which artists activists philosophers and engaged citizens search and envision a more sustainable future for a common planet a symbolic institution as milo just described which is global decolonial clearly feminist and intersectional the questions we are asking how to live in this world as a multifaceted poly polyphonic humanity and what kind of knowledge do we need to gather and assemble and yes assemble for a solidary future how to understand the deep connections between the climate crisis and the human rights to migrate and to use the freedom of movement how to conquer authoritarian ideology while also creating new radically democratic spaces what can we do but let me first introduce myself to you before i explain to you in detail the experiments we created and encountered in the last one and a half years i am speaking to you today about assembling political power and using the magical tool of theater and art because first of all i come from a migrant working class background of the polish political diaspora in germany and theater was never the space where my family and our community went i think because in germany it's still very closed for a certain class and i got to know the power of theater through our public school system so as part of the i call it Hogwarts generation theater art and poetry became my own personal tool for survival in a time where the world started to enter in new times of crisis planes flying into skyscrapers when i was 11 deep racism killing people and terrorist attacks in my own country like in Halle and also in Hanau and a renewal of authoritarian and fascist ideology entering the global political stage second in the beginning of my 20s i became a dedicated political activist in various progressive movements and initiatives although as part of the generation why i missed the whole occupy movement because i was still too much engaged in the neoliberal dream that i grew up in and i participated in my first political rally for the right to the city for all and migrant rights in 2013 in Hamburg afterwards san pauli the district of Hamburg where i was born was declared a danger zone by the local administration declaring left progressives as enemies of the state to fight against in 2017 four years later i experienced my first collective trauma with my allies in the g20 summit in the exact same city i was born in i suffered through stages of severe cynicism of being tired of political engagement of deep anger and rage but also persistence long camaraderie networks of solidarity and growth in the last years my friends and comrades were radically asking how can theaters become active spaces of civil society again who can enter these spaces who do city theaters and national theaters belong to and i think school of resistance sees itself as one of the many experimental toolboxes that are currently being created to radically open up the theater to communities of solidarity of care and of knowledge so after getting to know me now a little bit i would like to introduce you to school of resistance the last one in cologne where we tried to assemble political power by using theatrical as well as performative tools under the slogan for politics of justice we entered or were invited by the schauspiel cologne on the weekend of the german national elections last september as connecting already to what milo said through our campaign with migrants and illegal workers in the project new gospel we as the ipm created our own distribution channels directly supporting illegalized workers in southern italy closely cooperating with activists and trade unionists and a month of really heavy connecting daily zoom meetings with progressive german NGOs and also in europe helped us to connect to campaigns in the german scene linking even members of the european parliament to our cause and having a close creative session with leave no one behind an NGO in germany and that was created after the burning of moria on the greek island of lesbos so how could we join forces to intervene in the highly energetic summer of the german elections i remember it was a time of frenzy and energy also in our team but we asked these questions how can the system of dehumanization illegalization and exploitation of migrants in europe be overturned and in a big collaboration with different actors like zebrücke seawatch poise pro asyl we connected to the campaign human rights are non-negotiable and we released a commonly written manifesto the so-called cologne declaration for policy of justice and humanity signed by over 80 public figures right before election day and we created a joint fundraising campaign which supports human rights lawyers to bring responsible politicians and officials to court i think i could say that we really did explore in a big alliance of the civil society new possibilities and potentials for the convergence of art and activism locally we connected the school of political hope to the school of resistance a lot of schools emerging that organized a city entangled workshop program we organized three hybrid panels with experts of change from the congo to pakistan to lesbos to kassel and because we are a school our program of people's education and it's i think true a sense we ask the how questions again how can we build social movements and create tools for civil disobedience but now what's next because my favorite political slogan is after the rally is before the rally so after all our last events in munich berlin and cologne the school of resistance is landing now in the belgian city of gend on march fourth and march fifth you're dearly invited all listening we will coordinate together with gend sonder grenzen the in my name campaign and la coordination de son papier which hunger strikes last summer in brussels the undocumented refugees and gend who will voice their political will how can we make gend a city of solidarity and even a sanctuary city as local initiatives are trying to build it up and who are the citizens of gend today who is the citizen to enter the the end again and we will experiment with different workshops on art and activism connecting also to local climate activists to actively decolonize our knowledge as well as give the stage to undocumented artists we believe that self organization and representation of the disenfranchised and illegalized is our political goal of the coming years and the european elections of 2024 are maybe another symbolic moment we can maybe wrap our minds around together political exclusion and disenfranchisement of workers need to be overcome this means also the idea of voting rights for migrants regularization of illegalized citizens and the radical opening of political institutions as a theatrical project we can reimagine democracy and try to bring it back to its core of community solidarity and care centralizing the question of the political subject in a global society as we already tried in the general assembly 2017 is crucial and we as the school of resistance think that at some point the campaigning logic of the civil civil society will fix what the state doesn't want to fix has to transition into a very clear political conquest of institutions as milo wrote once in a mail and because let's be honest we tried everything occupations conferences campaigns it is not enough and we need to deconstruct and reconstruct ideas of political representation but also create the political conquest of institutions and i'm coming to my end now bear with me march through the institutions was coined in the 68 movement but how about hacking institutions playing in its true theatrical sense with institutions how can we enter public spaces like theaters or cultural institutions and shift and shape the hegemony of public discourse but also create new communities of care we have the space look at the castle that is right now being rebuilt in the middle of effing berlin it is huge so much space so what can art do and what can't it do we can generate creative methods for political movements and i think jay and isa are more active on the ground specialists for that than me but we are thinking right now in our networks about legal creative strategies and how to intersect art justice and activism if you have anything on your mind please write us and i do believe and i think my colleagues believe the same that art gives us the utopian space to think the impossible and improbable and the poetic creation of the world and our relation towards it and we are all relational beings we relate to the materiality of this planet there are no rules and no boundaries like artisans we can shape imagination thought and even feelings and this could be our possibility to overcome the dogma of there is no alternative of the late 90s which i'm a child of artistic knowledge can be a true tool for the radical transformation of the world we want to live in and i think for me it's a world of solidarity care and community justice and friendship so my last lesson i would like to share with you now after five years of engaged political art and activism keep up the micro work every conversation every new relation counts you don't always need a huge audience or scandal be patient with the small steps the persevering relations the patience of common creation it takes time although we don't have the time so believe in your own micro work and now ending again with the quote by one of our teachers i started at the beginning of this lecture Angela Davis again you have the floor you have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world and you have to do it all the fucking time thank you thanks so much for this and yeah i'm already really also looking forward to talk about how how hackable institutions actually are and what your experiences are with this so we will talk about it in a moment thanks a lot and now i would introduce well first not the last speakers because isabel fremore and and j jordan prepared a film to give an insight into the sat and to the work and to the assemblies um isabel fremore is an educator facilitator and author she was a lecturer uh in the burk burbeck college university in london in from 2001 2011 before deserting the academy to apply herself to movement building she co-authored the directed the book film the last one tears the lute blue lute blue little p so and most recently the beautiful book that i can just recommend we are nature defending itself entangling art activism and autonomous zones which just came out together with j jordan and j jordan is an an art activist, author, part-time sex workers, full-time troublemaker, labeled a domestic extremist by the UK police and the magician of rebellion by the French press. And JJ has spent three decades applying what he learned from theater and performance art to direct action. They founded the direct action groups, reclaimed the streets and the clown army, worked with a cinematographer for Naomi Klein's The Take, co-edited the book as we are everywhere and lectures and theater and fine art. And it's also in a way an ambassador, I would say, in many art contexts, I don't know, we would call infiltrator ambassador. So actually a guest very often speaking in art context about why art institutions suck. So I'm really happy to have you here and we will see your film and talk about it in a moment. We begin with compost, that swarming multitude of microorganisms, that seething, teeming soup of aliveness, which transforms everything in its grips, death into life, life into death and back again and again. Compost, it's a chemistry of carcasses that transforms all who inhabited. Flesh ingesting and digesting flesh, life rotting and shitting, but always bringing forth prairies and forests, food and flowers. It's a chemistry to which we will all eventually return. Compost comes from the Latin, come, with, together. Post from ponea meaning to place, to place ourselves together. This is one of the reasons we begin to talk about the art of assembly with compost, but it's not the only one. In many ways, assemblies are the beating heart of the laboratory of insurrectionary imaginations practice. We see them as prefigurative rehearsals and trainings for a revolutionary process, for creating worlds without competition and domination in the here and now. Since 2004, we have brought artists together with activists to co-design and deploy creative forms of disobedience. We don't call our practice works or pieces or projects, but experiments. And every experiment is self-organized through consensus decision-making, where everyone is part of the process of collective design. Consensus, to literally sense together, to feel something together. Consensus is the opposite of voting, where the majority get their way and the minority have to just accept to lose. Consensus is a process of listening to everyone and synthesizing each other's feelings and ideas into a solution that all can actively support or at least can live with. Consensus is never easy because no one spectates. For it to genuinely work, everyone must contribute and believe that collective intelligence is in reach. At times, we have brought this process into the theater itself, turning the stage into an assembly, but never as a sting in itself, never just for the form. For us, the assembly is a process to break down the toxic binary between audience and performers. An assembly by its nature is something to participate in. It is not a show, not something to watch. Instead, we want to give people the taste of cooperative practices. But the most important part is to make a collective decision that leads to a disobedient action outside of the theater. When an assembly is no longer going beyond itself, when it is just an experience and not a space from which actions can be made, then it loses its raison-être and becomes hollow. As most of these acts were illegal, we don't have footage of the assemblies itself, but two experiments stand out for us. For Crash, a post-capitalist ATZ at Arts Admin in London, the audience arrived directly on stage, which was filled with dozens of wheelbarrows with long handles, a lot of plants, and other strange equipment that looked like a kind of survival kit waiting to be activated. The audience were presented with a clownish-like training in consensus decision-making by characters in black leotards before sitting down in a large circle ready for the assembly to begin. Someone explained the set. The pimp-twheelbarrows, which were designed to transform into a mobile camp with tents and gardens that could be set up and taken down quickly. The questions for the assembly was, do we want to take this camp into the nearby financial district and set it up for the evening, even though we have no permission, making it an act of disobedience? Every night, the audience debated and ended up deciding to leave the theater and disobey. A member of the crew did the facilitation, the crucial craft of listening and synthesizing. Like all the best performances, facilitation requires a deep sensibility, but unlike most performance, it demands a total relinquishing of the ego and an opening up to the collective desires of the participants. Facilitating consensus is a form of channeling. It is the alchemical art of assemblies, distilling the collective sense and differences into a creative solution. A temporary camp was set up, squeezed between the skyscrapers of London's financial centre. This was 2009, two years before the Occupy movement. Perhaps the experiment was a kind of poetic, prefegative vision of a movement that would bring collective practices in camps to financial districts across the world two years later. Is a red democracy! Is a red democracy! In 2012, we brought another audience into an assembly on stage at Camp Nugol in Hamburg, for what is enough. We're following a legal briefing by lawyers. The audience were asked whether it was ethical to go out to the theater into the city, armed with ants to sabotage computers and put them into the banks that finance fossil fuels. But that's another story that we don't have time for. Of course, the assembly said yes and went into the city. We love theater, but we think that today the best theater happens outside of its walls and stages. Its beauty is found in the streets and fields when everyday life becomes entangled with art. We're living in an era marked by a system whose obsession with limitless growth means that until there is some kind of radical system change, it will always place the economy in front of life, sucking the living into its globalised circuits of capital, forever expanding and voraciously devouring more and more worlds. For us, the role of art in the disasters of the capitalist scene is not to show the world to people, but to transform it together. Our most successful and meaningful experiments have always been deeply embedded into self-organised social movements, where we work as organisers and artist-activist co-designing actions. It can involve organising a pirate treasure adventure to find buried boats and launch a regatta to shut down a coal-fired power station during a climate camp. This can mean turning hundreds of abandoned bikes into tools of disobedience during the UN Climate Summit to protect an assembly of indigenous and frontline climate justice organisers from police violence. It's all about taking their force away, you know, distracting them from the crowd to keep the crowd safe. 200 people walked out of the conference to come and try and join us. Unfortunately, the police were just too violent and wouldn't let them through. All arrested, all bike-locked. We ran into remnants of another swarm after. We have memories of so many dramatic assemblies during these movements, making decisions that had real historical impacts. Imagine 100 people sitting in a circle deciding where to hold the UK's second climate camp, which would involve thousands of people squatting the site of a climate crime and for a week, setting up a self-managed camp with hundreds of workshops and mass-direct action at its end. Some people wanted to squat the site of Heathrow Airport's proposed third runway. Passions were high. One person is in tears, convinced that the army will be sent in if we touch Heathrow. We take turns to explain our positions or ask questions. We discuss visibility, political impact and local endorsements. We will never forget that moment, eight hours into the debate, when the facilitator finally asks, do we have consensus? And 100 people wave their hands in silence, signalling their agreement. We have consensus. The next climate camp will take place at Heathrow. The room erupts into loud cheers. We still feel the hairs on the back of our neck tingle as we recall this moment, a moment that made history. The runway is still not built. We see why theater makers love the intense drama of assemblies and why they want to bring it into the dark box of the theater. Yet for us, this is what vampires do, not what artists should be doing at this moment of history. Sucking the form out of political movements to feed a cultural career is what so many so-called political artists are doing despite the crisis of these times. So much creativity is put into building empty mirrors of this dying world rather than constructing ways to resist and build other worlds. We're living in a time where it is easier to imagine the collapse of life as we know it than reinventing the right ways to live together. No artist or activist has ever had to work in such a moment in history, and yet our culture continues to turn its back on life. Business as usual is the order of the day, especially in the museums and theaters of the Metropolis. Perhaps the best term is not vampire, though, because vampires don't have a choice. Artists do. Perhaps we could call these practices extractivist art. Extractivism takes nature, stuff, material from somewhere and transforms it into something that gives value somewhere else. That value is always more important than the continuation of life of the communities from which wealth is extracted. Artists' careers are built out of sucking value out of disaster, rebellion, animism, magic, movement, whatever is a fashionable topic at the time, and regurgitate it into an unsituated detached experience elsewhere, anywhere in fact, as long as the codes of the world of art function. But whom do such pieces serve, ultimately? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN Climate Scientist, not known for their revolutionary spirit, wrote in 2018 that if we want to avoid the worst of the catastrophe, we had 12 years left for rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society. We must revolutionize so much of our existence, and fast, this must include art. Why make an installation about refugees being stuck at the border when you could co-design tools to cut through fences? Why a performance about the dictatorship of finance when you could be inventing new ways of moneyless exchange? Why make a dance piece about food riots when your skills could craft crowd choreographies to disrupt fascist rallies? Why bring an assembly on stage as a spectacle rather than design joyful ways of making decisions together to be used for social movements to be more resilient?  A place that French politicians used to call the territory lost to the Republic, but that we who inhabit it call the zone à l'éphane, la Zade, the zone to defend. A place where decisions taken by ragged assemblies of activists, locals and farmers, won against the French government and one of the world's largest construction multinationals, Vensi. The Zade is on the western edge of Europe on the spine of two watersheds, on the edges of the village of Notre-Dame-de-Lande, near the metropolis of Nantes. Here, living life in common became a weapon against an airport and its world. We don't have time to recount the story of this 40-year-long struggle against those who dreamed of building another temple to hypermobility, another extinction machine, another airport for the city of Nantes. But the resistance began with local peasants in the 70s and spread during the assemblies of France's first climate camp here in 2009, local inhabitants invited people to come and squat the land. To defend the territory you need to inhabit it, they said. And that's exactly what happened. Over the years, an autonomous community emerged with its bakeries, pirate radio stations, tractor repair workshops, brewery, banqueting hall, medicinal herd gardens, a rat studio, dairy, vegetable plots, weekly newspaper, flour mill, library, and even a lighthouse built where they wanted to put the control tower. The ZAD became a concrete experiment in taking back control of everyday life. In 2012, the French state's attempt to evict the zone was fiercely resisted, and neither police nor government officials sat foot there again for six years. About 80 different collectors were established, and over 350 people shared life together in the way of the bulldozers. The state had gambled on that old story that rulers need to tell themselves that people without strong governors, weaponized police and prisons, will inevitably destroy themselves and fall into chaos. In their imagination, this would be the ZAD's inevitable fate. Those six years were no Shangri-La. There were current conflicts and crises between people with very different visions. But everyday life, with its mess and complexities, had to be self-organized collectively and as horizontally as possible, through affinity groups, working collectives, and assemblies, while continuing to organize a movement against the airport. To sense the movement's differences, picture a long assembly, co-organizing one of the actions to conjure away the airport. Over 100 people fill a barn. Dairy farmers sit next to anti-species vegans, tractor-driving libertarian communists who would provide tons of communal potatoes are opposite primitivists, refusing to have any petrol vehicles or even agriculture near their dwellings. There are feisty, retired women for the local towns besides spaced-out barefoot hippie runaways. There are deserting engineers and ex-condicts, drunk punks with dogs and fluffy ecologists, black-block anarchists next to an ex-marass. And these assemblies were some of the most theatrical we'd ever seen, with huge moments of tension, with everyone on the edge of their seats because we were literally organizing a movement that meant life or death. Not only for this territory, but for our bodies too. Within the movement against the airport, this ecology of struggle is referred to as its composition. Instead of trying to resolve differences, it requires each component to try and work together to pursue common desires that go beyond what we thought was possible alone. Through the encounter of differences, there is a process of contamination, whereby all change each other. Farmers become squatters, and squatters become farmers. Locals are radicalized, and radicals become locals. This process is far from easy, but when a composition works best, it reflects the self-organizing balance of complex and mutual aid, competition and partnership of organisms. In an ecosystem's short term, everyone is eating, digesting, and becoming compost for each other. Life is a constant flux of breaking apart and being remade. But in the long term, only behaviors that enable the whole ecosystem to flourish are amplified. Whether it's a prairie or an ocean, a forest, or your gut, each interrelated part meets its own needs while creating the conditions that support and transform the whole. In the ecological commons, writes Andreas Weber, the individual can realize itself only if the whole can realize itself. Ecological freedom obeys this form of necessity. The deeper the connections in the system become, the more creative niches it will afford for its individual members. Perhaps we should call the movement process a compost pile rather than a composition. In a compost pile, everything is cross-contaminating. Nothing is pure. Making movements as compost is taking the risk of doing things together, not just sitting around talking about radical ideas. These wetlands from which we speak continue to become wetlands. Farmland continues becoming food-producing land, assemblies of inhabitants and users of the land continue to take place. The airport will only ever be a negative shape, a ghost of the extractivist empire. Holding back the monoculture machine, decolonizing a place from capital, opening it up as somewhere that enables forms of life that to connect and unfold, that is what is beautiful. That is the aim of an art of life. An art that lets life live more. Thanks so much and welcome back, everybody. Thanks, I mean, there's so many things in this video, but one thing I think already probably marks a difference. Maybe that's not in the core what we're talking about, but actually maybe that's the base for why we're talking about it, that how much assemblies actually are embedded in everyday life. So an assembly is not something planned and worked for once in a while, but it becomes really a constant process. At least that's what the film very much suggests in a way, that it's like a practice that is permanently present, which maybe probably for the most artistic projects already would be something seen quite differently. But maybe just to start, you already said it, but to kind of connect a little bit, when you were talking about vampire art, just reminded me that Brecht was talking about Cannibal's Theatre, where in a way something similar he described, he said like taking the stories of workers and putting them on stage basically means misusing them again, extracting from the workers again. So there's maybe a connection to that. But I wonder with this clear stance that you had towards this work, do you believe still that there could be some value in some of the, in this logic of as if in the theatrical space, in what in a way Milo's symbolic institutions are on the border of, so they have a branch in reality and in political activism or in real politics, but also they have clearly a stand within the symbolic realm. Do you think that that's of any use or just that's waste of time and let's go somewhere else? Well, the answer is always it depends, of course. I mean, we don't wanna make generalizations. I mean, we do have a foot in the theater spaces and the art spaces. And when we haven't really deserted, we do try and dance between the two and we think that those spaces are, they are public spaces. Mostly they're funded with public money. They are our spaces. They are our spaces to transform and create. And I think one can be involved in radical practices within those spaces. I think one thing we realize though is often it involves letting go of your cultural capital. And that's quite complicated for artists and especially for artists who actually whose living is entirely based on those kind of practices, economically living. But I think we think that sometimes that artists are so trapped within that cultural capital that actually they can't, they can push the legal, you know, push a kind of radical agenda or something just so far and then they'll stop because they know they won't get re-invited to that institutional space. So yeah, those spaces are useful but I think we often say, be prepared to scupper your boat in English. There's a term to scupper the boat when the boat is about to sink, you put a hole in it so that it sinks safely. Yeah, and I think that I was very inspired by what Kasha was saying. And I think that this idea of hacking the institutions is something that I feel very inspired by. Is that because I truly believe that, yeah, these spaces are our spaces and Kasha asked a fundamental question is there, who comes to these spaces? And the thing that there is when we try to really address these questions and think in terms of hacking and actually re-appropriate them, re-appropriate them genuinely with this idea of not being extractivist but really think about the impact it has on the communities that the material is drawn from and on, then they can become spaces that are fruitful and interesting. So yeah, it depends what is being done. I think that for me when an issue are real, our heart really is when the assembly is only taken as the form and is gutted out of everything that it's supposed to do because an assembly is not a forum, an assembly is something where stuff happens and stuff happens when there is real life in it. It's like a compass pie. I think we will probably at least two points, the question of who comes into it and the question of the hackability of the institution. Come back maybe in a moment. Again, I would just maybe Emilio because also because due to time reasons, we didn't speak about the general assembly, which in a way is an example, quite an interesting example. We had a conversation about it also because it most clearly resembles an assembly also. It has a certain agenda and at the same time, it is also an artwork, I guess. It's also a stage production. Maybe could you just bring it into the loop? It doesn't make sense that I explain what was happening there, just say two, three sentences about the general assembly also and maybe also then address the question that we also discussed, what is it to be a director of an assembly like this? What does it mean being a director of it in terms of what is proposed? Yeah, okay. I mean, the general assembly that was inspired again by the votes in Germany I think at that moment, like four years before, it's four years earlier of the Cologne Declaration and the School of Christians in Cologne and we were asking ourselves, but who sits in this German parliament? And because it's a very important parliament because Germany is a very important economic power in Europe and those on other continents and that's why we were asking, but who should be in the German parliament? So it was a kind of a way to say we have only the 1% that it's even asking, even inside Germany, you have to, I mean, more than a million of people that have no right to vote. So I mean, that were our question, how could you possibly represent what German economy is doing outside Europe in again in the Congo in Latin America, et cetera? How can also the, can the nature be represented? So it was a question about, that's true intellectual question or somehow philosophical question about political question about representation and it was trying to build an assembly that could invite everybody who is touched by the decisions of the German parliament. So this was the idea and we called it world parliament for that reason and absolutely that's a symbolical institution. And I think it was on the one hand it was, I would more describe it as an experiment while for example, the revolt of dignity is really trying to create a sustainable circle. So the general assembly was more a kind of an experiment to find out, but what for example, could be discussed there? And the interesting thing that we found out, I'm just remembering now, we found out that when we are talking about world politics, normally it's kind of we are talking about culture politics and how to invade other cultural spaces to prescript how they should decide on whatever while for example, economy is still extremely nationally decided. And we found out this disbalance, so to say. On the other hand, yeah, I mean the general assembly, I think that's one reason why we went from there to the School of Resistance and to smaller gatherings of how one group, I think we are more in the connecting than with the general assembly than in the real holistic practice of one group. So it's a very different project to for example, the revolt of dignity. It was a very interesting moment. I must say general assembly was in terms of these questions but many questions of assemblies in theater really in a quite interesting experiment also with where it became confrontational. So I remember the sentence of one, somebody from the audience saying, which very much is in the line of what I was saying about what somebody said that the artist organizations in the national somebody stood up and said, yeah, for you it's theater, but for us it's our lives. And this of course brought the whole dilemma quite in a nutshell. And also your role in it, like being an initiator but still also a theater director as it was in the credits and then in the situation that you had to come up we don't need to go into the details now but the conflict was coming up that made it necessary that you stepped on stage in this and suddenly kind of had to make decisions or to have to report also which was really bringing all these questions of theatrical assembly to like in a nutshell to the four I think. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I mean, there is also there was a big dysfunctionality inside. I mean, you were describing this moment because you saw problems that you will have. I mean, it's kind of how would newly created impossible assembly because it was the one problem of this assembly was that there were conflicting ways of thinking things that were so extreme that this assembly all the time was very close to not survive in the next gathering. So, and that was one really big problem. I remember one confrontation between an Armenian citizen or a philosopher a Turkish political figure and an African philosopher, so I mean they were like kind of how we would interpret the next. It was a, yeah, I mean, I'm just now remembering it was a quite crazy experience. That's true. But can I add to that because I remember looking at that in this moment and Isa said it already what assemblies are not the form but some sort of energy. And in this moment where like there was this tumult or conflict and the audience started to ask questions about democracy and who can speak and who can should leave the assembly and what could be said. I really, and I don't want to sound spiritual but I felt an energy that I think is just possible in life. And I mean, that's the great thing when you have a big theater which you can fill with like 60 activists from all over the world or philosophers and then create some sort. We didn't even create this moment. We maybe put the right people in the room but the moment emerged itself and then it was there. And then there was really an assembly moment of what is democracy and how can we decide together. And I found that quite also inspiring. Maybe because to continue just in this if you were involved in the general assembly and now you're working on the School of Resistance. Maybe you could also continue from what you just said what would you take out of the general assembly and for the School of Resistance and what is done differently. What is a different take on it or was there a learning process also for you from the School of Resistance from the general assembly to the School of Resistance? I think one of the learning processes was the revolt of dignity and really what Milo already described as the I don't know, getting more in touch with the networks the people, the activists on ground really more listening I think and really listening in the sense of their needs. And I'm still learning I think, but for me it was like the general assembly was just the start of maybe a process that goes more into the direction what I think Isa and JJ also described of really bringing assemblies or into public space and if we call it theater or not but assembling change makers or experts of change or revolutionaries. And for me it's just like for me what I learned the most is and what I'm really excited now also for Gantt is really getting to know local initiatives that do great city work because I think this is and connecting it to global experts or global activists. And I think this is where I'm really interested in where we, I mean, the whole right to the city movement of the last 10 years it started in Barcelona but it is also present in London and Paris and Berlin and all these city initiatives do so much amazing work like here in Berlin, the expropriation campaign Divay and Eignan this is radical community work they're doing and I think like how do we assemble this knowledge of the local with the global? So it's faster, we can like spread it faster. That's kind of what I'm interested in. And perhaps to add one thing to the I think the problematic of representation is the problematic of you call it extractivist or vampiric and I think it's absolutely true. On the other hand, what I learned from sometimes when activists and artists are working together and merging but also working in some distance that in these dialectics there can be a multiplication of the effect of what the one side or the other side could do. And that's for example, I think that this regularization campaign that was initiated by the revolt of dignity and helped by the film a lot was already there but not working. And on the other hand, of course we didn't initiate it but coming these two powers together this say propaganda film and this huge distribution machine that we brought with the cinema machine together with this problematic of being exploited on the field and having to find contracts and having to find a representation to be regularized. It was only in this connection that it worked and both sides were not complete somehow. And I, so when I'm thinking about it because of course extractivism is a big problem. I see that there can be a dialectics where these two possible alienations that the one side can't enter or hack the system and the other side is in the system and doesn't know how to use it that this going together is sometimes really beautiful. I mean, I think that the synergy that we can find between artists and activists something that we've been exploring and working with for many, many years. And I think that the example of the film for me is exactly the non-extractivist because it really thought about the impact that it has on the community and how it can change it. And I think that this is where- You're talking about the New Gospel? The New Gospel, yeah. For me is a brilliant example of a piece of art that doesn't take stuff to only feed the artist's career without thinking about the impact but actually brings the two energies and two experiences together and tries to really have that kind of synergy to make it more than itself. So I think that this is where it really can become this cross-contamination and become more than itself which for me is in a way the definition of an assembly of whatever the form is. Like it's a space that takes the risk where all the parts in that space take the risk of becoming more than themselves and accepting to by becoming more than themselves maybe lose a little bit of themselves in a very fruitful and productive manner. So in a thing that this is what I find this is why I think that these institutions still can be hacked and need to be hacked because I mean, it can produce something that is a very basic principle of redistributing resources. And I think that this is what we need to do. Whatever the resources, wherever we are, it's about finding ways to redistribute them and making them more than what they are initially. And but I think that there are some frameworks that are so, I feel quite toxic though still in those spaces. For example, it shocks me to hear you talk about the General Assembly and talk about audience because for us, the General Assembly doesn't have an audience. That's the element of assembly is there is no toxic binary between audience and spectator. And that's why a lot of our practices have always been influenced by carnival or ritual because for us that is the, in a way to make social change you need to break that audience spectator binary. Doesn't mean that artists are great at creating events and situations, you don't need that. I think we need to break that. And I think we need to break the hierarchies, the fact that there's always the director that the piece is always named with a singular person's name. And we know we all work, however much we work, all the practices we do are deeply collective. They're produced by hundreds of different people. And yet so often there's just one name as the creator. And yet we know that creativity is a collective practice and normally a practice of synthesis. Anyway, there's never anything new. We are simply synthesizing our ancestors' ideas. Maybe to pick up because it relates to this question, how heckable are institutions actually? And I have the feeling there's a, so maybe we stick also because of the expertise of everybody here, we stick maybe a little bit to the theater scene because I think in the visual art the institutions are even more complex because they are more entangled with the market and so on in comparison to that theater often seems to be still quite a haven of possibilities. I mean, not to idealize it too much, but at least it's not often not with already boards that would be worried about their collection and so on. So maybe things are a little bit more easy to shift or that would be the question at least. On the other hand, it's quite the demands of the in German speaking countries, but also some others, there's quite a discussion around it now. Like what kind of leadership should they have? And of course it usually doesn't say, let's have a general assembly with everybody, but at least it says, can there be a collective running it? I know the group around Volksbühne wants something that would maybe more go into the direction of a general assembly, but I would say far for being implemented. So Kasia, you can maybe react to that, but my question is actually so how much do these institutions have to change or how changeable are they if they're not really new founded? I mean, Milo, you're the director of NTGENT and you implement a lot of these things, but I guess you're not working on making a general assembly out of NTGENT or are you? Just first to answer the question of the public in the general assembly in 2017, of course it was an incomplete experiment and that's why we developed a lot in the questioning how assemblies should work, but actually what it was, it was just three days of a parliament from people from all over the world came together to talk and to make decisions and stuff. And the so-called public who could imagine like in the real parliament, they could walk in and listen to it and if they want interfered moments, it happened all the time or then go away again. But it was also the idea that these people that came from sometimes really far away and had no voice would not all the time be overthrown by the, I don't know, by the people from Berlin. So there was also a kind of a respect towards this assembly from the so-called public. So that's a bit more the situation that was there. Concerning the NTGENT, I mean, there, I mean, perhaps I can also take it from the side of the public. So you have, we are confronted to immediately with problems that are architectural problems. So you have, I mean, you showed very well, I was for a second thinking, is this the main house of the NTGENT again when you were showing this Italian stage with the balconies? And yeah, so that's how these houses still look.  And then we exchange, of course we play a lot of time, the public is on stage together with what is happening. So you can play around a lot. So that's the one side of, let's say the situation itself that you create campaigns, hybrid formats, discussions, days of ongoing assemblies like this event that would happen now in the minimia. So in one room where we can cook and we can discuss and then we can have a moment, the school of resistance and we go on. So it is more long-term gatherings of people with many formats or now we are doing a festival with all our friends from Fohort and from Campo and so you go from one to the other and you look this and you look that and mixing everything because even the genres are not gathering in the, even in the theater. So you have the opera and then you have the kind of the city theater, then you have the children's theater and so on. So to mix this completely. I mean, I could go on for a long time because I'm quite new in the institutional world and it's still very interesting to me, but let's say democratize or I don't know how to call it ways of deciding that everybody present in the institution, for example, can be heard to make this institution richer is what we are doing since the beginning with a lot of tricks that try to overcome, for example, in shifting functions that when you are a nectar, then you can also be a parameter and you can be a director and you can be at one moment part of a political assembly so that you would not in the institution you are fixed on your position. So that's a bit, yeah. And many, many more examples where I stop here. It's a... But of course, I mean, it's interesting because of course you will also represent to come back to something that Jay said before that you represent an institution which is a famous artist basically and you're also involved in different institutions and you're also the director of it. So somehow you also, you live and work with this contradiction that you also embrace I guess to a certain degree because it's your modus operandi you also integrate a lot of it. Then it's, so how do you feel or do you ever have the feeling that you actually would give up or think it would make sense to give up the role you play as a director but also as a certain person in the symbolic, in the real and the symbolic hierarchy and would that be possible or something desirable for you?  Now the internet is still there. So let's see. I have to explain, I explained before that storms were announced. Electricity cuts could happen in close to the second by the way I'm now, so it happens. But just don't worry, continue. No, I mean, symbolic space is a bit more difficult for me to understand and to grasp but let's take the institutional space. For me it's the first theater I'm leading and I'm not born to be an artistic director but I said, okay, when I go inside an institution I will take it as an experiment and I will try to change it as much, I can and make it as much also transparent as possible that everybody will know what happens and why it happens, et cetera. And I think the last step of course is when I arrived I said, okay, I will be there for a number of years. I said five years. I think now with Corona I will stay a little bit longer but I think that it's like with the Symbolical Institution you always have to work that you don't feel anymore. I mean, that you can or that you kind of dischange you want to introduce is not necessary anymore. When I arrived at the end again, it was a beautiful house but with a fully white ensemble with star actors and the kind of a cut, let's say, relationship to the society, to the city, to the politics. And I said, okay, I want to open all those wide open that society can come in again in the city theater because it's the theater of the city. So that's what I tried to do and where I want to go further but in the end it's very clear that I have to disappear in let's say some not so many years and then that was it for the end again. And for me, I mean, it's, yeah. On the other hand, I also feel solidarity and it's difficult to disappear. For example, when we take the new gospel, I mean, every day I'm having one, two, three phone calls with our activist friends from South Italy and then we bring the tomatoes there and we bring the tomatoes there. We try to push it here. Then we do another show of the film in a church in many churches here and there and here and there. So when you are once involved, you continue. So it's also very difficult, I think, to go away. And I think that somehow it's the most radical practice again what you are doing in the South to just say, okay, that's somehow that's the center, that's the place and everything that happens happens in this world. In this world and that's, yeah, that's another radicality. So I mean, yeah, being director still is a bit or artist is still a bit Fakon Bondage and it's, I don't know how to really bring it together. I want to poke more in this direction. Just as the technical thing, in case I'm disappearing, then we'll just continue for a couple of minutes and enjoy and finish at some point, please. Because I have no idea how the internet is working with all the electricity here, but it seems to do so. But maybe to continue, Kasia, with your experience with the art institutions and theaters and maybe also in working in different places. So as I said, you're also part of a group which we talked about in the series already that has quite radical demands for experiment, but it's not really involved in it. So it's a bit demands from the outside, which are probably the most radical. And on the other hand, you're also living with compromises, I guess, every time you work in an institution. So what compromises are you willing to accept and how far do you really imagine that institutions could change in the direction that we were talking about? So I just want to share the crazy discussions over the last years I had with my dear colleague and friend and mentor Eva Maria Berchi and my comrades, Sarah Wartafeld, who have very differing views on the whole idea of funding and money, because in the end, that's it when we're speaking about distribution and redistribution and also city theaters in Germany have immense money, like the Volksbühne has immense money that can be used. And I mean, the contradiction probably is what kind of money you use for what? And I think that's also a little bit the hacking. So in the end, I mean, we have to question why, I mean, already also German universities but also German theaters are funded by economics, like economic partners. So we have, of course, money that is also public money is also we, like we know what money is, it's an energy but it's also corrupted. And so I think these are the contradictions living in this world. So having radical demands for a collective opening and also leading of a city theater and also then using the money that the state or city gives to you but then also using funds and money, of course, of funders. And I think this is a big contradiction where I'm still thinking and we're all thinking. But other than that, I would say just speaking about the radical opening or as you said, the critical kind of mass that questions the city theater as an institution and wants to create an institution. I mean, that's the only thing that stopped to Glitzer 2017 to try to do with the transmedia performance B6112. So it was just, okay, the city reclaimed it and said, this is our space, we can use it and we can do whatever we want with it and we can organize it. And we can organize ourselves because as Isam Jay said in there also film, I mean, it's what we learned as collectives and as a humanity. If we want, we can really organize ourselves. And I think I'm just happy that the anarchist I am, I'm entering these institutions and people are like, I'm just also very happy to enter these spaces because I think, yeah, we see it with activists from all over the world in Russia, in Belarus, in Colombia, people and artists and activists who have radical views of how to change the world or also Isam Jay talking about what is happening on the ZAT and also in other collective campaigns. It's also dangerous. And I'm happy that I'm right now as privileged as I am of doing the work I do and trying to also bring two stage people or into the center of the work we do that are not so privileged. Like, I don't know, we have this very great protagonist who will also come in March to Ghent, Parvana Amiri. She's a poet and activist from Lesbos. She's a young refugee woman from Afghanistan who's a writer. And I don't know, I just through the networks we have, we are connected with her right now that well, that we want to publish her poems. We want to invite her and just giving a stage to an underprivileged artist maybe. And then we can question again, who's curating what and who's deciding what. And we all want to decide together, but it's probably the experiment we're still living in. I hope I was not too flowery. Thank you. I mean, as a take. Yeah, but just one thing about, you know, hacking an institution, I mean, you know, we know very well that institutions have feedback or powerful institution, any powerful group, any powerful collective, any powerful assembly will have very powerful, positive feedback loops.  You become because you want to stay part of it. I mean, it's an inevitable thing. And, you know, and we can see how, you know, the last post-60s attempt by radical movements to become political parties, then enter parliament and the German Greens being the classic European example of this process.  And so I think, you know, that's for us, we've always said, stay on the edges. You know, if you're neither in the, you know, trites, as we try really to stay on the edge, we're in the radical social movements and, you know, we have one foot in the radical social movement and we have one foot in the institution. But we really value that edge that neither falling into one or the other, but keeping on that edge, which, you know, in ecological terms, the edges are always the most fertile, they're where there's the most combination of relationships between different species. And I think the danger of hacking is that you become the darkness that you want to get rid of. Maybe to slowly come towards to an end, one question, maybe trying to combine two things that are in my mind and that I think also on this line that we're talking about is one is, of course, who is involved in this that Kasia was mentioning in the beginning, like who's going to a theater, but maybe also who is, if it's not on your own land, who's becoming an activist in, at least in some places, I think is part of it. And the other thing that was discussed in the series also quite often, and that you stressed very much, Isabel and Jay, the question of consensus versus something like that Milo called an antagonistic situation. We used often in this series the term, the agonism drawing from Chantal Mouff. So how much, first of all, who is part of it and how can we change this actually also in the art institutions and how much disagreement then is possible. You mentioned at the end of your film, a quite diverse group of people gathering in this ensemble on the set, but still it's an assembly with the common ground for this moment, but probably many other things would be maybe not negotiable, but there's a certain ground for it. So how can assemblies in activism and in art that we were talking about deal with this question of becoming, yeah, how much voices can they include? How much disagreement can they include and still work? Or does it just become a representation of disagreement? For example, in a theatrical assembly. I know, sorry, that was a big thing, but maybe just pick out of it what you personally would be interested in. Whoever wants to start with that. Milo, do you believe in consensus? Yeah, yes and no. I think it was also in your film, or it was something you said that don't imagine it as that everybody would all the time agree. You know, all the time there is discussion. I mean, consensus actually is very antagonistic in my humble opinion. And that's how I, for example, learned it in the new gospel, you can see it. But for me it was in the New Testament the very interesting thing is that the group around Jesus, so let's see this activist group is not imploding because of the pressure of the empire, is imploding because of the disagreement of the people inside the group. So, and that's very important to understand that there is not consensus and the happy group of the activists and they would all be agreeing all the time. And on the other hand, you have a kind of a, let's say more classical democratic idea that you have majority and minority and different parties fighting each other and so on. I think you have even in the smallest group you have these different parties all the time but the interesting thing for me in this project is really the moment of in a common project integrating these different powers. I think you call it compost or I don't know that you would kind of live together and have this friction all the time and somehow something else starts existing which is much more intelligent than all these little disagreements or you even understand that these disagreements were necessary. I mean, the whole film, the New Gospel is about the disagreement of classical trade unionists Shani Fabris and a modern way of organizing of this migrant farm workers like Ivan. And then you have, and in the end they somehow come together and of course this is a very old leftist utopic idea that you would overcome antagonism but not deny antagonism. And that's what makes me think your beautiful question Florian. I mean, I certainly agree that consensus is essentially a space of disagreement and conflict. And I think that we should not be scared of conflict. We need to learn how to deal with it in a way that is not this terrible state of a situation where there necessarily is a loser and a winner. And I think that this is so much how we are educated into thinking. And I think that conflict is a very, very fruitful and productive state of affairs if we learn how to make it something that is, again, I repeat myself but when we learn to make it more than what it was in the beginning then it can become something that is very, very synergetic and it's just a matter of and it's not about being super utopian it's about learning to actually listen, genuinely listen to the other and believe in collective intelligence. And I think that this is what all the spaces can be the, any kind of space can be the space for that kind of practice because it is a practice and it is a practice that is slow and that can be at times painful and at times the most exhilarating experience than one can have, but it's a practice that is at the roots in my view at the roots of the changes of the worlds that we want to see is that we need to relearn to do things together. I mean, it sounds really basic but I think that this is what really we have we've been spoiled of that capacity and we need to relearn it. And of course, you need to have some common ground but I think that they are spaces that have shown like Occupy for instance was a space that showed that people have more common ground that they are being given credit for and that when given the opportunity or when the opportunity is grabbed then they actually show that they have more common ground and that common ground is actually being denied and it's being broken and everything is done so that common ground is not made is not turned into solidarity. It's like actually, I really think that very often solidarity is broken by authorities much more than by people themselves. So yeah, it's a practice and it's a practice that can really be unfolded unfolded in absolutely every setting including theaters. And the thing that they are theaters is that for instance have really tried to explore ways of even managing a theater in very collective ways. And it's complex and it's a matter of it's trial and errors all the time but life is trial and error. But whenever we teach consensus we say it's a tool we can run many things on consensus but there is the pirate what we call the pirate technique but actually there's one thing you can't run with consensus and that's war and conflict and fighting and that's part of a revolution process and the pirate ships often were run as direct democratic assemblies and then when they actually went and went to get another ship then the captain would take charge for the moment of conflict and we've had many experiences of where we thought we could run conflict through consensus. Well, I'm talking actually struggling with authorities or actions and so on but actually consensus is just a tool for most things in life except war. So in war we can have, I mean there's appetizers of the same the community run the communities except in conflict when it used to be subcommon to Marcos and now it's Mosez who run the army. I would just like to add two things to what maybe Issa said. So the so-called evolution of safer spaces into braver spaces. So because I think everybody's just really tired and we're like the problem with this like whole process of learning to talk again with each other and learn compromise. It takes time and we all don't have the time right now for the healing. I mean, there's like colonial trauma, there's patriarchal trauma and there's no time to heal but we need the time to relearn it again how to interact and really true solidarity and that's what I always feel like, okay but I feel like there's movement right now. Things are changing which makes me happy and the other second thing is maybe to saying what Jay said, like to some people you don't speak with some people, I'm sorry if someone is a fascist, I say who wants to kill people because of the way they look or they are or they feel or they think. Yeah, I radically want to be against this person and that's my enemy. And I don't know, this is like maybe something where we're all still like, yeah, slumbering around. What's the next stage of it all? Thank you very much and also for the, you already, Kasia also gave a, no, I don't have the word anymore but made a bridge to the next edition of the Heart of Assembly which will happen in two weeks on the 10th of February in Zurich, analog, hopefully and online as well and with light maybe and we will deal with questions of safer spaces and safer spaces. So we stay in the realm of theater and we'll with Idyd Caldo and Julian Warner try to investigate this a bit more. So please come back, join us again. And thanks so much, well you all for coming and contributing and of course, well as always there's not enough time but I think it's very clear that what you're talking about is also embedded also in your practices. So there's more to look up and get deeper into it on the website, there are also links and other materials. And I think it also shows that, well, I'm obviously not so much against assemblies also in the context of theater that also what it does also is it brings also maybe a contradiction or makes a contradiction within the theater visible which is already breaking up open sometimes something. So I think also actually the assemblies as different as they might be and as vampiristic they sometimes are, they often also help to put a thorn into the institutions at least that would be my optimistic view. So thanks so much for being here also thanks to Thomas Schofs for doing the technical side and putting us online and hope to see you all again online but also analog soon again. Thanks so much and good night. Thank you very much.


The end is near! The end is near! And indeed, the end is here for a mission that has revealed to us more about the origins of the Solar System than we expected. The European Space Agency's Rosetta probe will be landing itself on the surface of a comet. And this is your space pod for September 28, 2016. The incredible story of Rosetta is one that begins well before its launch. And in fact, the origins of Rosetta can be traced back to a mission that was designed in the 1980s that never got off of the CAD terminal. CROF, Comet rendezvous asteroid flyby, was proposed in 1986 as a part of NASA's Mariner Mark II program, an attempt to generate cost-effective probes after the multi-billion-dollar flagships of the 1970s. This mission would have launched in 1995 with the flyby of an asteroid and arrival at Comet Cuff in 2000. CROF would have spent three years in proximity of the comet as it orbited the sun and eventually fire a penetrator probe into the comet which would be sampled by an onboard laboratory. This collaborative mission between NASA and ESA, however great it would sound, would never go beyond the conceptual design phase. U.S. Congressional meddling would cause funding to be dropped in 1992 in favor of continuing the Cassini-Huygens mission. ESA still wanted a cometary mission and decided to pursue it themselves once the U.S. Congress cut NASA funding and thusly Rosetta was born. The main bus of Rosetta measures two by 2.1 by 2 meters. The 3,000 kilogram spacecraft weight included Filet, a 100 kilogram washing machine sized lander, two solar arrays measuring 14 meters long, power Rosetta with up to 1500 watts. Originally scheduled to launch on an Ariane 5 on January 13, 2003, Rosetta would be targeting 46P Virtinen, but a failure of the Ariane 5 during a launch in 2002 delayed the mission by a year, with new launch finally occurring on March 2, 2004, with comet 67P Turuyamov-Gerasimenko as the new target. A complicated trajectory to allow Rosetta to catch 67P was designed. It included a gravitational assist from the Earth in 2005, a gravitational assist from Mars in 2007, another gravitational assist with Earth in 2007 as well. In 2008, Rosetta performed a flyby of asteroid Steins, which allowed for a test of Rosetta's scientific package and navigation systems. Another gravitational assist of Earth was performed in 2009, setting Rosetta out on its final orbit to rendezvous with 67P. In 2010, Rosetta performed another asteroid flyby, this time of Lutetia, a large asteroid. After this, Rosetta put itself into hibernation, its trajectory nearly taking it to the orbit of Jupiter. Finally, on January 20, 2014, the spacecraft was pulled out of its 31-month hibernation. Approach of 67P began with the series of burns in May, 2014, and finally in August of 2014, Rosetta entered into orbit, the first spacecraft to orbit a comet. November of 2014 found Philae drop to the surface on an ambitious first landing on a comet. Philae took eight hours to fall to the surface, but its harpoons to keep it attached did not fire, and it spent the next three hours tumbling over the surface until it landed in a crevice. Cut off from the solar energy it needed to power itself, it spent three days gathering data and transmitting that back to Rosetta before it finally died. Rosetta then spent the better part of the next two years orbiting 67P, studying it from up close and as far as it made its closest pass to the Sun. So, what did Rosetta and Philae teach us? We learned that the isotopes of water found on and from 67P are significantly different from the isotopes of water found here on Earth, meaning that we now hypothesized comets delivered less of the water on Earth than we originally expected. We also found a significant amount of schnapps on 67P, and no, not that kind of schnapps. This kind of schnapps, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. The six elements that are critical for life are found in abundance on 67P, meaning more of the organics needed for life could have been delivered by comets. Rosetta will now finish its mission by descending to the surface after a collision maneuver will aim it towards the surface of the comet. Its scientific instrumentation will operate all the way down, but as for what happens upon impact at one meter per second, well, no one truly knows. The European Space Agency expects to lose contact immediately, as Rosetta wasn't designed to land on any sort of a surface. But back in 2001, near Shoemaker, a NASA mission landed on the surface of asteroid Eros, and it wasn't designed to land on a surface. So who knows what will happen, but I sure do await whatever it does. Thanks for watching This Space Pod, I'm Jared Head. So, tell me in the comments below, what was your favorite part of the Rosetta mission since it's now wrapping up? Also, of course, don't forget to find us all over social media, on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube, or everywhere that you can possibly think of. And of course, we've got to thank all of our patrons of our Space Pod Patreon. Yes, these folks are why we are able to make these Space Pods happen. If it weren't for these folks, we would not be doing this right now. We would be off doing something else, like my actual homework that I need to do. If you'd like to help crowd fund the Space Pods of tomorrow, head on over to patreon.com. So, until the next Space Pod, keep exploring!