What Must Be Re-Imagined

Between November 3 and 5, 2017, Swiss-German director Milo Rau and his production company the International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM) staged a transnational judiciary assembly of artists, activists and eye-witnesses - a symbolic institution for the future that sought to activate its delegates and audiences - under the title General Assembly. This contribution, a collaboration between dramaturg/curator/activist Kasia Wojcik and scholar/dramaturg/critic Lily Climenhaga, engages in a multi-temporal exploration: a base text written in 2019 that critically examines General Assembly (2017) from a spectator perspective that is then itself reflected upon - reflections from Climenhaga and Wojcik that considers both the performance and the text about the performance. The article is a process of returns, an experiment in scholarly and artistic revisitation. Together, Wojcik and Climenhaga reflect - in a sort of bracketed thinking - on the ever-changing, always developing quality of political art and its scholarship that accompany inevitable processes of increased scholarly and political engagement, the creation of new connections, the undertaking of new projects, and accessing new perspectives.