Living Together: George Maciunas’s Collective Colonies and Migration Projects

Abstract This essay analyzes George Maciunas's collective migration projects and their relationship with his view of Fluxus as a collective organization. Both of these aspects, migration, and collectivity, were not only essential in Maciunas's way of thinking but also affected the way he understood the configuration of Fluxus. Over a timespan of twenty years, these projects took various forms, with the colony of artists being one of their many configurations. In doing so Maciunas was using a somewhat anachronistic collective symbol which implied a claim for collective bonding. By developing this aspect of Maciunas's life, overlooked in the growing bibliography on this artist, we highlight the complex historical situation Maciunas was facing: in a time of clear polarity, a reconfiguration was taking place around new models of thinking on new models of living together. In this task, the theoretical work of Roland Barthes and his posthumous How to Live Together will be particularly useful.