ASSEMBLY COMMUNION
Abstract * A conceptual tool for reading collective gathering as a provisional aesthetic-political event where bodies, institutions, vulnerability and disagreement produce temporary forms of public life. Keywords * Socioplastics AntoLloveras LAPIEZA-LAB Assembly Communion AssemblyCommunion ParticipatoryArt InstitutionalCritique publicspace dissensus - Essay * AssemblyCommunion studies collective encounter as an aesthetic-political form—how bodies gather, and what gathering produces. Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells critiques participatory art that demands audience involvement without addressing power asymmetries; the “hell” is the false community that erases difference in the name of togetherness. Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics celebrates art that creates social micro-utopias—but Bishop asks: whose utopia? The dinner party that excludes the allergic, the conversation that silences the inarticulate, the collaboration that exploits the amateur. Andrea Fraser’s institutional critique turns the museum inside out, showing that assembly is always already mediated by funding, walls, class, race, and security guards. Grant Kester’s the one and the many argues for dialogical art that respects local knowledge and takes time; assembly must be slow, attentive, accountable. Jacques Rancière has been removed from this node (now only in AttentionPresence) to avoid repetition; instead, Judith Butler’s notes on assembly is added. Butler shows that assembly is performative and precarity-driven: bodies gather because they are vulnerable, because they lack what they need, because they must appear together to be recognized at all. The square, the street, the plaza become provisional bodies that rehearse other modes of being together, beyond spectacle and representation. “Communion” is now explicitly provisional—not religious fusion but the shared moment of risk: a strike, a vigil, a sit-in, a reading group, a meal. Ontologically, AssemblyCommunion posits that the collective is not a substance but an event; it appears, acts, and disperses. Methodologically, it requires assembly ethnography and participant observation of protests, participatory art projects, and community meetings—attending to who speaks, who is silent, who leaves, who stays. Empirical fields include Occupy movements, climate strike assemblies, community theater projects, and parliamentary committee hearings. The proposal is to design for dissensus: assembly should not aim for harmony but for the agonistic encounter of different interests. AssemblyCommunion thus offers a politics of the provisional: we gather not because we agree but because we need to contest.
Bibliography *
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bishop, C. (2012) Artificial Hells. London: Verso.
Bourriaud, N. (1998) Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel.
Butler, J. (2015) Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Fraser, A. (2005) ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’, Artforum, 44(1), pp. 278–283.
Kester, G.H. (2011) The One and the Many. Durham: Duke University Press.
Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso.
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lloveras, A. (2026) ‘Systems Theory as Autopoietic Organization’, Socioplastics-1504. LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
Mouffe, C. (2013) Agonistics. London: Verso.
Extended Reading · Related Socioplastics Cores * Socioplastics-1504 — Systems Theory as Autopoietic Organization — https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/05/socioplastics-1504-systems-theory.html · Socioplastics-2509 — Agonistic Space — https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/05/socioplastics-2509-agonistic-space.html · Socioplastics-2997 — LateralGovernance — https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/05/socioplastics-2997-lateralgovernance.html · Socioplastics-3202 — Two Ways a Field Begins to Appear — https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/05/socioplastics-3202-two-ways-field.html · Master Index — Socioplastics Project Index — https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html
