ABSTRACT
In 2017, artist Jonas Staal, whose works have been exhibited in various European institutions and biennials over the last decade, published a text entitled “Assemblism.” The neologism allowed him to cast his practice as an artistic and political programme, making the difference between the two domains appear obsolete. New World Summit has taken place in Berlin, Brussels, Utrecht, as well as in the public space of Derik, the autonomous northern Syrian region of Rojava, and has gathered, for instance, representatives of various stateless states and independence movements often classified as terrorists by official states. The manifest recurrence of forms and concepts throughout Staal’s work turn his artistic projects into long-term programmes that relentlessly stick to their political aims. Rau’s call for inventing new institutions is perhaps most tellingly epitomised in the 2017 project General Assembly, which intended to install nothing less than a world parliament over three days in Berlin’s Schaubuhne theatre.
