I’ll definitely ask you afterwards to connect me with the person from Austria and with Leopoldo in Italy, because I’d really like to talk to them.
Do you think of visual assemblies as more of a horizontal, peer-to-peer interface? Or do you think they also create a space through which ideas can reach institutions or people in power?
It depends on how you do them.
Actually, I should say something about how the format has evolved. First, it was these public art projects, like the one in Portobello Road, with complicated technological settings and people on Zoom. Then it became simpler, with just a piece of paper around a table. Then there was one in South Korea during a biennale that used stickers placed on the floor, so you did not even need an artist. You could draw, remove, and redraw.
Now, in Nairobi, in the central library, which is actually the biggest library in Africa, we are preparing a large sticker installation on the children’s floor. It will be installed in July, for National Reading Day, and it will be about how to build a playground.
We already did the same visual assembly in St Vincent, and I now think playgrounds are a better focus than cities. It is very difficult to build a new city, but very easy to build a new playground.
In St Vincent, I went there with Alastair Parvin, who is a famous architect. He created WikiHouse and has built 30,000 self-built houses in the UK. He helped me formulate the correct framework for making playgrounds through visual assemblies in a way that would be super cheap to build and could be adapted to different cultures and materials.
The idea with playgrounds is that they become a reason for people to practise talking to each other. Playgrounds are multi-generational places in the city, and children rarely play alone, so there are always different adults around. Our playground design is very simple: just sticks, hammocks, perhaps other very cheap elements, and a place for visual assembly in the middle.
Then people can add whatever they want. In St Vincent, for example, they wanted to build a garden there, and also some kind of kiln so they could make ceramics with children and sell them, turning it partly into a marketplace. I do not yet know what they will do in Nairobi, but it looks like we may have access to the space in front of the library to build a playground. So people can imagine the ideal playground inside, on the sticker, and then go outside and start implementing some of it. They might invite artists to do sound installations there, or masks, or political manifestations, or whatever the group concretely wants.
So if you do these as permanent public art projects, like a playground, then of course they become a public statement, and whatever people create there can carry a message. But in order for that message to exist, the horizontal structure has to be in place first, so that people can actually come together and have tools to speak with each other.
That makes sense. How important do you think the material, physical setup is? Whether it is a street, a room, a table, a piece of paper, people being together in person? I know the first one combined Portobello Road with Zoom, but do you think visual assemblies could fully translate into a 100 percent digital environment? Could there just be visual assemblies on Zoom, or would something essential be lost?
I think this is the same conversation we always have about technology. Anything can work; it depends on the concrete people involved and why you are doing it.
Of course, online versions are possible. Leopoldo was telling me that we should try it with one of those platforms, I think Miro or something similar, where people can draw together. Yes, probably that is also a good possibility.
But I do not think it is ever one or the other. Everything should exist in parallel, and has to exist in parallel. That is how it survives.
As visual assemblies continue to evolve, there is obviously a lot of conversation in both artistic and political contexts about AI. Do you see any role for AI in something like a visual assembly? Could it be useful in any way, or might it undermine something essential?
Of course it could be useful. As with any technology, it depends on how you use it.
If people are having a conversation about social places, then often a lot of research needs to be done, and AI is excellent for research. Imagine that people are discussing a city, or any kind of social space. There are so many technical questions immediately. How do we deal with garbage? Is it possible to build a river that flows uphill? How much would that cost? So yes, definitely, AI could be one of the participants in the visual assembly, in the sense that it provides a huge number of facts.
I would suggest using three AIs, because AI still hallucinates, so they could check one another.
Is that something that is already happening?
No, not yet. That is just an idea that came up during this conversation. We should definitely try it next time.
Here is a question. The countries I listed are the countries in our project, and two of them, Tunisia and Hungary, are more authoritarian or restrictive contexts. Do you think visual assemblies could work in more authoritarian political contexts? And if so, how?
That is a very interesting question. You should talk to Miles, who did them in New York.
New York is not exactly an authoritarian context.
No, but when they were doing these drawings on the street in front of the hotel, the police came immediately and told them to leave. The organisers were very well prepared, and they said, “No, this is a public space, and we have the right to do this.” So the police left, but then came back with a hose and started washing away everything they had drawn.
I mean, that is about physical removal. I am thinking more about the fact that in authoritarian contexts, people may be afraid to speak about politics. In the US, at least so far, people are not afraid to talk about politics in that way. But visual assemblies are based on visual language. Do you think they could open up spaces in those contexts, maybe in the way Aesopian language worked in the Soviet Union?
I hope so. I very much hope so, because who can forbid people to draw together? It is difficult to ban that, although of course anything is possible at a late enough stage.
But on the other hand, since the process makes ideas literally visible, in contexts that are more surveillance-heavy or more dictatorial, do you think it could also be risky? Especially in places where expression might be monitored or punished?
I think if visual assembly became a recognised brand, or a clearly branded tool for collective political deliberation, then perhaps yes. But at the moment, because it is still something new and unfamiliar, I do not think so.
If a bunch of children are doing what looks like an art workshop, that is not usually seen as threatening. And that is what we all do, or should do: invent tools that can slip in quietly and create space.
To shift slightly, and I know they have been done in a lot of different places, and you already mentioned the gender difference among children, which is really interesting. Beyond gender, have you noticed any patterns in group dynamics? For example, do leaders emerge? Are some people heard more than others? Are some people’s contributions more central while others are more marginal? Any observations like that?
Yes, absolutely. It is a normal group environment, and the visual assembly is only trying to smooth it out and provide space for people who otherwise might not have a voice. But of course there are always people who draw tiny houses that you can barely see, and who hesitate to speak.
In New York, in one assembly in the Disobedience Archive, there were migrants from Latin America who barely spoke English, and they were very shy. They drew tiny houses.
At the same time, there were activist types who were very assertive, even aggressive, saying things like, “No, we should do this,” and trying to energise the group and convince it to move in a certain direction. You could really see that they had developed those skills in traditional assemblies, where taking over a group, energising it, and persuading it are useful capacities.
That leads to my next question. If there are disagreements or tensions, how does the process deal with them? What is the mechanism for negotiating them?
One of the tools is to have two tables next to each other, which works especially well with children. One table is utopia and the other is dystopia. People naturally look over at what the other group is doing, and then the division becomes quite natural, because people tend to know whether they want to draw utopias or dystopias.
It is also an interesting observation that dystopias are always very poetic, because people invent nightmares, vampires, and things like that. Utopias, by contrast, are always very pragmatic. People say things like, “Okay, how do we solve this problem?” or “What about the weather conditions?”