-ATI: Laughing While the House Is Burning

A question, more urgent today than it might appear, runs through all purportedly political practice: what does it mean to oppose an act of power without, in the same gesture, reproducing its form and inheriting its grammar? Is it possible, as Giorgio Agamben has theorized, to mobilize a kind of destituent potency that produces an untimeliness, a gap in which power continues to speak but is no longer believed or believable, bereft of its symbolic strength? In the broad array of symbolic resources and strategic tools fashioned not to help secure power but to render contemporary apparatuses of power inoperative (tools including tactical frivolity, joy, trans-species animism, critical magic and enchantment) none is more devastatingly effective than the act of laughing.

Laughing While the House Is Burning, a project by the Rome-based collective -ATI, takes an apparently harmless release and turns it into a catalyst for participation, intervention and disobedience. It is a practical, collaborative enquiry into how the architecture of institutions upholds acts of power, and above all about how laughing has the potential to scupper those acts of power. It is a project, in other words, about laughter’s destituent potential to cause the performance of power to fail, by vacating its “conditions of felicity” in a prodigious roar of collective laughter. Today, the house is burning, and the only ones laughing are the arsonists—laughing not at the flames or the charred ruins but at having reduced the rest of us to stunned spectatorship and acquiescence to the Strange Event (whatever it may be). Laughing While the House Is Burning seeks to render that spontaneous hierarchy inoperative, following the story of a collective of architects—not really architects, but not not architects either—who by the time the project is complete will have assembled a Destituent Laughing Choir, a community of laughers made up of any and all who are desirous to laugh together inappropriately. The laughter is inappropriate because it unleashes the blasphemous, desacralizing potential of laughing on acts of power that are clad in institutional legitimacy. Though normatized, can these acts of power withstand the profane scrutiny of a chorus of destituent laughing? What if performative speech acts and the fiats of power they instantiate were greeted by nothing but great peals of laughter?

Laughter comes cheap, however, when it picks only self-evident targets and destituent laughter eschews such safe havens. Far from targeting aggressive institutional power alone, the laughing choir will also take aim at what might be assumed to be sacrosanct and the acts of power it may conceal: the morals, the heroes, the slogans, the manifestos, the good causes, the institutions that pay and the audiences that applaud. Whatever makes us feel safe gets the first laugh.

At the entrance to this atmosphere of destituent hilarity, a film retraces the coming together of this community bonded by laughter, documenting by anticipation the assembly of the laughing choir at the project’s core, which is to come together and to laugh publicly over the coming months at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Dozens of laughing bubbles—three-dimensional renderings of those found in comic strips, used by the choir members to train and underscore their gestures—fill the gallery space, which has become a rehearsal studio for the choir as they prepare for the collective joy of laughing publicly. 

This is a call to laughter.

Want to take back the power of laughter? Fed up with the arsonists monopolizing laughter while the house burns? Want to debunk the normalized seriousness of acts of instituted power? 

Join the choir.

Then leave and start your own.

No previous laughing experience necessary.

Curated by Tamarind Rossetti + Stephen Wright