Jonas Staal New World, New Unions

In this lecture, artist Jonas Staal will speak of the artistic and political organisation New World Summit, which he founded in 2012, and the subsequent artistic campaign New Unions, which started in 2016.

The New World Summit aims at developing alternative parliaments for stateless and blacklisted political organisations all over the world, taking the shape of large scale architectural constructions in theatres, art institutions and public spaces, which the artist initiated in, among others, Berlin (2012), Kochi (2013), Brussels (2014) and Utrecht (2016). These 'stateless parliaments' housed more than fifty organisations, ranging from representatives of Scotland, Catalunya, the Basque Country, Kurdistan, Baluchistan, Somaliland, Azawad, East-Turkestan and West-Papua - challenging structures of exclusion on a geopolitical scale through the domain of art. Since August 2015, the New World Summit has been building its first permanent parliament commissioned by the Kurdish autonomous region Rojava in northern Syria, where a new model of democracy has emerged in the period of the civil war based on communal economy, gender equality and local self-governance.

Taking lessons from a variety of autonomist practices discussed and explored within the New World Summit, Staal's recently started New Unions campaign attempts to introduce alternative forms of unionising in response to the current European political, economic and humanitarian crisis. According to the artist, the current European crisis is also a crisis of the imagination: an incapacity to think beyond the option of returning to the traditional model of the nation-state on one hand, or abiding the existing EU and its severe democratic deficit on the other. But a coalition between emancipatory politics and art, the artist argues, could bring the possibility to articulate third, fourth, or fifth options of the kind of union we would truly desire, and to which the imaginary of art can help bring into being.