Angela Melitopoulos und Maurizio Lazzarato

The project Assemblages traces the path and thinking of Félix Guattari through the four “existential” territories that defined his therapeutic and political practice: the asylum of Saint-Alban and the clinic at La Borde, as well as Brazil and Japan, countries Guattari travelled in extensively. In Saint-Alban and La Borde Guattari, working with patients, artists, theorists, and scientists, implemented a “politics of experimentation” in which institutional psychiatry became the locus of a political and theoretical debate over the production of subjectivity. Guattari expressed his conviction that a “provisional but necessary” return to animism might break open the ontological tradition of modernity, which categorically separates subject from object, nature from culture, man from animal, animate from inanimate, matter from soul, sign from thing, individual from collective. Besides archival footage of Félix Guattari the installation shows selections from documentaries and films; interviews with friends and colleagues; footage produced at the clinic at La Borde; and material shot during research work in Brazil. With its three screens the installation constitutes a diagonal cross section of the archive: it arranges archival materials and commentary in a new form of indexing: each projection screen of the triptych corresponds to one mode of sensory address. Assemblages also reflects Guattari’s concept of agencement, and points to the visual narrative in Asian art, or the cartographic element in animist art.