Nabil Aniss
Politics of assembly - Politique de l’assemblée
12 min, Brussels, Belgium, 2024Excerpt - 2min
The film "Politics of Assembly" examines the critical redefinition of communal care for diasporic bodies that extends beyond the Western paradigm. It challenges traditional concepts of kindness, benevolence, and mutual understanding in the context of communal care, proposing that self-mutilation, agony, and suffering may be integral to genuine communal care as a form of resistance to oppression for diasporic bodies.
The film presents a challenge to the neoliberal perspective that communal care must always be soft and morally pure. It delves into Gnawa ontology, which offers an alternative approach to managing suffering and pain through sacrifice and self-mutilation.
The film "Politics of Assembly" offers a critique of the art world's tendency to soften and sanitise the concept of communal care, presenting it as a tool for suppression and concealment. Instead, the film puts forth the argument for a socio-political assembly that prioritises collective suffering and pain as a form of resistance and autonomy.
The film puts forth the notion that a state of communal care characterised by a lack of rigour and accountability can give rise to a necropolitical environment in which bodies are viewed as mere instruments that can be created or eliminated at will. It further suggests that diasporic bodies, driven by a desire to expose suffering, can redefine political institutions as a new crystallisation of the multitude of affects. The assembly, in this context, becomes a movement to safeguard lives and challenge state oppression, offering an alternative perspective on care that is defined by pity.
©2024 Nabil Aniss