'Itinerant Assembly'

Gasworks and Royal College of Art, 2017

What does it mean to inhabit the temporary?
Where do we find the local, when we are constantly on-the-move?
Who forms our community, when we exist inside a global network?
And what does it mean to be an artist in today’s digitalised and nomadic world?

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Itinerant Assembly was a six-month series of participatory commissions or ‘assemblies’ of people for Gasworks and the Royal College of Art. IRL and virtual ‘assemblies’ investigated the productive potential of temporary togetherness, framed against the voluntary and forced nomadism that defines the lives of many people today. The project considered how digital technologies enable and sustain hyper-mobile communities, creating networks of people able to collaborate across different countries and time zones.

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Assembly 1: Projective interviews with Gasworks residency artists, to better understand the experience of an artist residency today. 

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Assembly 2: A ‘Reading Troupe’ led by artist Emma Haugh, using improvisation techniques from Augusto Boal’s 'Theatre Of The Oppressed’ to embody extracts of 'The Temporary Autonomous Zone' by Hakim Bey.

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Assembly 3: Collective practice They Are Here produced a Movement Workshop with dancer Thiru Seelan, followed by a picnic discussion in Kennington Park.

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Assembly 4: International artist collective (play)ground-less developed a virtual reality site in which the four artists, located in different timezones, made artwork and performed inside. Visitors could access the VR space via Oculus, inside an immersive installation at Gasworks. Technical support from Werkflow.

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Assembly 5: The assemblies culminated in a live digital symposium taking place on a hackpad, an online open-source platform, with speakers including Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Shumi Bose, Zheng Bo and Lina Hermsdorf. The conversation was streamed online and into three London sites, Green Rooms, Second Home and Gasworks, animated in each site by performances from (play)groundless, Jane Frances Dunlop & Mira Loew, and Luli Perez.

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The project was curated by Alice White, Chloe Hodge, Hannah Zafiropoulos, Rosie Hermon, Tiffany Leung and Xiaoyi Nie, and supported by the Royal College of Art and Arts Council England Grants for the Arts.

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