Smooth new world: Agency and Utopia

The New World Embassy was created by Dutch artist and activist Jonas Staal and Tuareg activist Moussa Ag Assarid in 2014 as an art installation to represent the recently established state of Azawad. This new state, currently unrecognised, seceded from Mali in 2012 after a brief armed struggle. An analysis of the spatialities of the New World Embassy, and of the region it represents, enables its interpretation as a critical utopia, a heterotopia, and as an example of smooth space. Such an analysis furthermore clarifies the underlying sociopolitical dynamic in the region, and in its newly established Embassy, as the contestation, by the other, of the oppressive geopolitical practices and institutions of the same. Lastly, the spatialities of the Embassy exemplifies a particular mode of agentic worldmaking.