Assemblage - George Lewis

"Both the title and the musical content of Assemblage refer to a practice of visual artmaking that recombines and recontextualizes collections of natural and human-made objects. Assemblage-like processes were deployed in the work of Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Louise Nevelson, and Joseph Cornell; Jean Dubuffet called some of his creations “assemblages d'empreintes,” a name adopted by later generations of artists and curators. Artists such as Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, John Outterbridge, and David Hammons extended the practice, recycling and reframing the quotidian urban detritus of modern civilization’s African American imaginary. Sociologists of science and technology studies associated with actor-network theory, such as Bruno Latour, adopted the image of the assemblage to describe social/material formations that exhibit contingency, heterogeneity, nonlinearity, and emergence, as well as fundamental processes of mediation, remediation, and bricolage that the anthropologist Georgina Born applies to music. These are the spirits I’ve tried to evoke in this piece." George Lewis 

This film was recorded as part of the London Sinfonietta's socially distanced concert Yet Unheard at the Southbank Centre on 28 October 2020, a concert of music by established and emerging black composers, co-curated by leading composer and new music thinker George Lewis and experimental vocalist, movement artist and composer Elaine Mitchener.