Before we get started, could I ask you one more time to say on the recording that you consent to this ethnographic interview being recorded and used in a public space for the purposes of the research project INTERFACED?
My name is Nika Dubrovsky, and I confirm my willingness to record this interview for the INTERFACED project.
Thank you. Maybe let’s start at the beginning. Can you tell me what exactly Visual Assembly is, and how the idea first came about for you?
A visual assembly is an attempt to add to the set of tools that allow people to make decisions together.
Visual assemblies are always about different social spaces that we can create together, such as hospitals, schools, museums, playgrounds, or the city itself. At the moment, we mostly live in spaces that are created by professionals: architects, governments, and all kinds of other experts. Very rarely do ordinary people have access to influencing those decisions. Slowly, we have lost the practice of making those decisions ourselves, and that is where the visual assembly comes in.
Another part of the idea came from my late husband, David Graeber. He was a public speaker and an academic, so it was naturally very easy for him to speak in public and convince people. He was also known for coining very clear, memorable short terms that then became like memes or concepts used by many people.
By contrast, I am a migrant, English is not my first language, and I am not an academic or a public speaker. In fact, I am quite the opposite: when I speak in public, I feel very shy and unconfident.
At the same time, I was spending a lot of time with children, and I felt that children have the same kind of exclusion from public space that I have as a migrant and a non-academic. Around David, many people talked about assemblies, but they usually meant assemblies in which adults come together and speak to one another about social problems in order to make decisions. We noticed that in those situations, the groups I just mentioned, children, migrants, older people, and in general people who are not comfortable speaking in public, were either excluded or severely disadvantaged.
The idea of the visual assembly emerged during Covid, when everyone felt so isolated. It was the first time, I think, that many people really felt how badly humans need other humans. Since public gatherings were forbidden, David and I went to Portobello Road Market Square, which was empty at the time, and was in the neighbourhood where we lived. We organised a visual assembly in the square, and most of the group was online on Zoom. There was an art group from Extinction Rebellion involved. We were building together a “city of care.”
It was me, David, and my friend and neighbour Olga from our neighbourhood. Then, very quickly, a whole range of passers-by joined us, including local drug dealers, teenage boys, and even a couple who were kissing at first, then watching us, and then joined in to draw the map of the city of care in the square.
So that was the first visual assembly.
Do you still have a picture of that first one, of what the map looked like?
Yes, yes, we do. It was quite a crazy setup. I had made some stencils, and we were drawing a lot of things. David was writing rules in the style of speech bubbles in comics, based on what people on Zoom were telling him.
It was also an attempt to make the visual assembly into an art project in which the artists were only facilitators. We were there on the ground, so in a sense we were the artists, but we were not allowed to do anything on our own initiative. We were only tools for other people to make the thing themselves.
After our interview, would you send me a picture of that first one?
Yes, I can show you a folder with pictures, and you can choose some.
That would be amazing.
So my second question was really about what more traditional formats, like discussions and panels, were missing or limiting, but you have already answered that. You said they exclude people who do not have the cultural capital of being good public speakers.
So if that was what the first visual assembly looked like, and it sounds as though it was pretty spontaneous, did the format evolve with the later ones? Did everyone adopt the same format, or did it become decentralised, with people doing different things? How has the practice evolved?
The simplest form of a visual assembly is that you take a large piece of paper with a partly pre-designed social space, and then people sit around it.
There is a basic set of rules to begin with. Everyone starts drawing in their own corner. That allows people who are not comfortable in public discussion, or in collective activity more generally, to start by doing their own part independently, without having to negotiate anything.
But once they start moving outward from their own corner, they have to negotiate, because then they are entering public space. If it is a city, for example, you draw your house, and then you want to go to the shop, or to the hospital, or you need a road. That is where communication begins.
I have done these assemblies in many different places, and there are interesting observations about how people behave.
For example, when I did one with Kurdish activists from Rojava and other political activists at a conference in Hamburg, they had amazing ideas. They all worked together from the beginning. There were no shy people. They came up with all kinds of incredibly interesting features for how to create, for example, a police force in the city that would not become fixed or centralised, but would be an ever-changing group of people, so that no one could permanently grab power. They also came up with many other ideas that they had probably already been thinking about before, and the visual assembly gave them a very good space to make them more concrete and use a different set of tools.
By contrast, the children in the Amsterdam library were very different. I want to add that most of those children were probably children of migrants, maybe around 60 percent of them. One of the first things they brought up was what would happen if strangers came to their city. They did not use the word “migrants”; they used the word “strangers.”
And they came up with quite harsh ideas. They said things like, “We’ll let them stay for half a year, and then they have to leave,” or, “Maybe we can let them build some city underground where they can live and then come out.” There was a lot of very dystopian, almost cruel thinking there.
But one thing that is very similar across many settings, and I have now done this in many countries, is gender difference.
About 90 percent of the women or girls build care structures, especially for children. The majority of the boys immediately start building protection systems, factories that make robots, or attack structures, depending on their age.
Is the topic always something like what kind of city we want to live in? Is that always the topic of visual assemblies?
No, it could be a city, but it could also be a school.
The second assembly David and I planned was actually supposed to happen in front of a large hospital in Graz, but he died two weeks before it was meant to happen.
So it is always about spaces, about how to organise space?
Social space, yes, because you have to draw it.
I understand. I know you have done them in a number of countries, so I’m going to list some countries and ask whether you did visual assemblies there, or whether you know of any being done there. Austria, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Tunisia.
Austria, yes. Last year somebody else did one at a conference in Vienna.
Do you know how that went?
Yes, because I later wrote an article with the person who did it. They invited me, but I could not go, so a man from Amsterdam went instead. He ran a visual assembly there, also about future cities. They did one on utopia and one on dystopia with two groups.
Belgium, no. Italy, yes, actually many times, I had forgotten. It was in Venice, and the main organiser there was Leopoldo. I was part of it, but he was really the one leading it. He was doing it through a festival. There was a lot of work there, including around mental hospitals and similar issues. He would be very happy to talk to you.
Spain, no. Denmark, no. Germany, yes, several times. In Berlin, I did it with children from the art world, and also with homeless children. A lot of the homeless children I worked with there were migrants.
Again, with children the most striking thing was the gender difference. It did not seem to matter which country it was. They were all very strongly gender-socialised.
Hungary, no. Romania, yes. That one was in the context of an art biennale, and again it was with children. It was especially strongly gender-separated. The boys were literally building robot factories that would kill everyone, and the girls were saying, “Okay, but if they start killing, then we need hospitals to take care of people.” They were all extremely enthusiastic. It was outdoors, it was very hot, and after two hours we still could not stop the workshop because they wanted to keep building more and more of these visionary cities.
That is another pattern: for the first fifteen minutes in almost every country, children ask what they are supposed to draw. Then they begin to ask, “Can we really draw whatever we want?” And once they realise that they can, they become incredibly engaged.
In Romania, they were probably between ten and fifteen years old, so mostly teenagers.
Tunisia, no.
You know the concept of interface that I described. Do you think visual assemblies are a kind of interface? And if they are, who or what are they connecting or facilitating? People, ideas, different forms of knowledge, something else?
It is definitely an interface between people. It is a technology, or maybe a poetic technology, for helping people connect to each other.
Another image that mattered for visual assemblies came from something David said about Madagascar. In Madagascar, and probably in many other societies of that kind, because the government has more or less abandoned poor communities, people constantly make decisions together. But their assemblies are not like sitting around a table, calculating votes, or filling in Excel sheets. They are more like dancing, sharing food, like a party.
That spirit is also part of visual assemblies. They should be enjoyable. There were some very large visual assemblies in New York, with huge numbers of people and mixed audiences: small children and adults together. That worked really well, because the children would just run to the huge table and start drawing very actively, without discussing anything first. They would draw rivers around the city, for example, while the adults were discussing and writing rules. That multi-generational participation worked extremely well.
In New York, there was also a man who was doing them on the street every Friday for about a month or two. One was in front of the Roosevelt Hotel, which had housed many migrants and is now empty. That visual assembly was done together with people in refugee camps in Kenya. It was about migration, and the question was how hotels around the world could be reconfigured to host migrants.