Angela Melitopoulos
2021Assemblages: Félix Guattari and Machinic Animism
Angela Melitopoulos, Maurizio Lazzarato
A visual research project reexamining the ideas of the philosopher and psychiatrist Félix Guattari on animismic culture as a form of collective subjectivity (collective assemblages of enunciation), as well as the time in his life when he tried to lay a foundation for a fundamental critique of modernist concepts. In an interview recorded during the Gulf War (1991), Guattari spoke of the emergence of a geography of resistance that arises especially where postcolonial systems are declining. A new de-centered, animistic subjectivity is central for rethinking “the Object, the Other as a potential bearer of dimensions of partial subjectivity, if need be through neurotic phenomena, religious rituals, or aesthetic phenomena."
Assemblages: Félix Guattari and Machinic Animism
Crossings
Angela Melitopoulos
Crossings is a four-channel video and sixteen-channel sound installation shot in metallurgy plants in Lavrion and Skouries, Greece, as well as in refugee camps in Lesbos and Piraeus. It is a documentary work that engages with the social dimensions and historical continuities of the region’s economic and civil wars.
Crossings
The Language of Things
Angela Melitopoulos
An attempt to translate Walter Benjamin's theory "On the Language as Such and on the Language of Man" into a montage using images from Tokyo's hightech amusement parks and artificial environments: precisely calculated acceleration and merry-go-round machines, sophisticated wave pools affecting bodies with promethic rhythms – how does the language of man and the language of things read in relation to the industrial development of hightech amusement parks and the calculability of sky-reaching affects? (Angela Melitopoulos) „There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents on language as such and on the language of man.“ (Walter Benjamin: "On the Language as Such and on the Language of Man")
The Language of Things
Passing Drama
Angela Melitopoulos
The video ‘Passing Drama’ reflects the acoustic image of Melitopoulos' family history. It tells the refugee story of her Greek family that came across three generations as a fragmentary and fairy-tale-like image. Flight as the fundamental motif of the story became the videographic theme of narrative, history and memory.
Passing Drama