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Can we speak to all the peripheries of the world,
which were mostly sidelined by history?
Can we organize our knowledge on our own terms?
What usually comes after every breakdown is a conceptual suicide, if the subjectivity of this planet is centred around individuals. It is very crucial to realise that nothing distinguishes oneself or a group, ontologically, from a crystal, a plant, an animal, or the order of the world. We are drifting together toward the noise and the black depths of the universe, and our diverse systemic complexions are flowing up the entropic stream, toward the solar origin, itself adrift. At the periphery we are not used to the illusion of the absolute, we are open to voices, slogans and treaties.
The idea of Assembly came out of the imminent breakdown of the project Periferry, started in 2007 by Desire Machine Collective on MV Chandradinga, an abandoned ferry docked along the river Brahmaputra. It had become the tool to think about this hybrid geography and experience mired with various uprisings, cosmogenic worldviews and most importantly differences. The absence of reference of Assam or the Northeast frontier in the grand narrative of Indian history is due to the region’s autonomy, fluidity and unstable geography, influenced by various natural calamities and the changing course of flow of the river Brahmaputra1. The impossibility of escape or exit from the infinite loop of colonization in this abstract zone influenced us to derive concepts from the experiences of state violence, animism and the indigenous worldview which ruled this frontier and resisted any form of governance.
The breakdown taught us the natural process of regeneration and importance of understanding the biological limit of being human, and helped to reorganize the scattered socius for the coming community.
Working in the northeastern part of India, it was always an urgency to improvise all the actions required for living, existing; to extend the concept of the multitude, a nonhegemonic group of people, in order to develop a dynamic concept of assembly along the lines of Negri and Hardt: the power of coming together and acting politically in concert.
The present day is defined by the intersection of three global changes: the rise of non-western powers, the crisis of environmental sustainability and the loss of authoritative sources. Can we speak to all the peripheries of the world, which were mostly sidelined by history? Can we organize our knowledge in our own terms?
We see the world through a wide lens and the only tool we have to reflect on it is philosophy, which in this case functions as a generator of concepts. But speaking from the periphery, we must also question what a concept is and how it is processed from our experience. We have to assimilate all our resources and reorganize knowledge from the basis. In that sense, culture, politics, history are not useful frameworks, on the contrary, they must be sidelined in order to address questions of ontology.
Assembly of Desire was conceived as an open system, without pretending to draw any conclusions at its closing. The meeting was planned in the winter of 2017/2018, on Majuli Island on the Brahmaputra, as the river has been the biggest teacher and philosopher for all of us here. I invited one last time friends and colleagues around the world to rethink or reorganize together, and received a flow of affirmation in response.
There was not even the option of not to assemble or question the possibility of this “social”, as it was a necessity to address these questions. All public spaces were taken down. There also is a certain performative and choreographic aspect to assembling on this island. The possibility or the hope of collective renunciation was important, as there was no cure to this depression. The only possibility was to bring together the network of friendship and philosophy in which we were organized.
An accompanying book, edited by the artist, was published in 2019. More information here.
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