DEMOS, Andreas Angelidakis, installation, 2016, dimensions variable,

photo: Stathis Mamalakis

Public Programs

The Parliament of Bodies

Acknowledging the crisis of the modern utopia of “public space” within the framework of the European Union, in which documenta 14 is institutionally inscribed, as well as the unprecedented proliferation of counter-power movements within art, culture, and society, the Public Programs refuse to be a discursive side-event attached to an exhibition. Instead, documenta 14 unfolds into a Parliament of Bodies, a performative structure that challenges not only the traditional exhibition/public program divide, but also the opposition between Kassel and Athens, North and South epistemologies, normative thinking and subjugated knowledges and practices as well as gender, sex, race, and class hierarchies.

What does it mean to be public? How does a body become public? What are the political conditions of representation? Is representation the only form of political, democratic action? Can the social contract be rewritten? Can an exhibition be thought as a Parliament of Bodies, as an ensemble of relationships between animate and inanimate beings producing agency through cooperation?… More

34 Exercises of Freedom

You are invited to be part of the Parliament of Bodies documenta 14 public program, hosted in the Athens Municipality Arts Center at Parko Eleftherias in September 2016. What will happen here during ten days of programming is neither a conference nor an exhibition.

We have avoided conventional museological names that establish distinctions between talk and performance, theory and action, criticism and art. Instead, we invited forty-five participants to “exercise freedom” within the building, which, not long ago, served as the headquarters of the military police during the dictatorship years. We understand freedom, with Foucault, as neither an individual property nor a natural right, but rather as a practice. We drift in history. There is a space. There are some bodies. There are some voices. But what does it mean to be together, here, now? What can be done? Who and what are made visible? Whose voices can be heard and which remain silent? How can the public sphere be reorganized?… More

#0 Introduction

by Adam Szymczyk, Paul B. Preciado, and Andreas Angelidakis

#1

by Linnea Dick

Linnea Dick is the daughter of Pamela Bevan and Beau Dick. She carries the Kawakwaka’wakw name Malidi, meaning “to always find a purpose and path in life.” She is of Kawakwaka’wakw, Nisga’a… More

#2

by Antonio Negri

Antonio Negri is professor of Theory of the State at the University of Padua. Negri actively collaborated in the debates and struggles of workers of the Italian radical left during the 1960s and 1970s… More

#3

by Niillas Somby

Niillas Somby is a Sámi political-rights activist, journalist, videographer, and photographer. He was one of the seven hunger strikers during the Alta controversy (1982) and lost an arm during a sabotage… More

#4 Educación cívica / Civic Education

by Sergio Zevallos

Mimicking bodybuilding training sessions, Educación cívica / Civic Education attempts to “train” social coexistence between bodies. We are all civilians: Even the soldier maintains a civil identity… More

#5 Freedom as Market Value. Freedom as Practice of Resistance

by Judith Revel

What does it mean to be free when the market exceedingly places the demand on individuals to be free, creative, autonomous, and striving? What is the difference between what Foucault, since the end of… More

#6 Memory under Construction: Towards a Public Memory of Torture in Greece

by Kostis Kornetis

After Argentina’s economic collapse in 2001, a discourse around body politics became strongly engaged in not only tackling but also actively working through the country’s painful dictatorial past… More

#7 Your Neighbor’s Son: The Making of a Torturer

Your Neighbor’s Son: The Making of a Torturer, Jørgen Flindt Pedersen and Erik Stephensen, Denmark, 1981, 52 min.
Film screening More

#8 This is not the Place. Four Visits to Villa Grimaldi: A Chilean Center for Torture and Detention

by Diana Taylor

Over the past ten years, Taylor has visited Chile's notorious Villa Grimaldi with survivors of torture as well as alone, using an audio tour. What does it mean to be in a place of torture and disappearance?… More

#9 Between Terror and Revelry. Collective Strategies of Resistance during Dictatorships in Argentina and Brazil

by Ana Longoni

SeekCurrent time1:01:15Volume

Both the Brazilian (1964–85) and the Argentine (1976–83) dictatorships were part of the Operación Condor, an illegal repression plan coordinated by different governments of Latin America, conceived… More

#10 DJ set

by Lies van Born

#11 Torture and Freedom Tour of Athens

by Vangelis Karamanolakis, Tasos Sakellaropoulos, Kostis Karpozilos, and Katerina Labrinou

Collective walk through the city of Athens, in collaboration with ASKI archives, exploring the historical traces of oppression, violence, and the quest for freedom during the military dictatorship of 1967–74.… More

#12 The Chronicle of the Dictatorship (1967–74)

by Pantelis Voulgaris

The Chronicle of the Dictatorship (1967–74), Pantelis Voulgaris, Greece, 37 min
Film screening

Εpitaph for Democracy
(9:30–11 pm) More

#13 Epitafios II

by Angela Brouskou – Theatro Domatiou and MiniMaximum ImproVision

Epitafios II is a collaboration between professional actors, musicians, students, performers, and the audience. A blanket of human bodies and objects covers the floor of the former headquarters of the… More

#14 Ojo de gusano: Don’t Look Down

by Regina José Galindo

They fell in Greece
They fell in Panama
They fell in Venezuela
They fell in Brazil
They fell in Argentina
They fell in Colombia
They fell in Ecuador
They fell in Chile
They fell in Peru
They fell in Bolivia
They… More

#15 Chronotopes / Dystopic Geometries / Terrifying Geographies

by Νeni Panourgia

Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that the chronotope connects temporal and spatial relationships of language to the ideological and political context that has produced them. Time, Bakhtin says, “thickens, takes… More

#16 Lingua Tertii Imperii

by Daniel García Andújar

Democracy has become a matter of aesthetics. The stage of the public has become a kind of orchestrated video game or operetta with a few recited parts; this operetta is performed daily for a people overwhelmed… More

#17 Red Star, Crescent Moon / after Sohail Daulatzai

by Naeem Mohaiemen

In Black Star, Crescent Moon (2012), scholar Sohail Daulatzai charts post-1950s Black internationalism as an intersecting history of black Muslims, black radicals, and the Muslim third world. In response… More

#18 Soundscapes of Detention: Music and Torture under the Junta (1967–74)

by Anna Papaeti

Although torture under the Greek military junta (1967–74) has been subject to scrutiny, with important trials in Strasbourg (1968–69) and Greece (the so-called “Torturers’ Trials,” 1975), the… More

#19 Attempt. Come.

by Georgia Sagri

Attempt.
Come.
Undefined.
Be the point of no-reference.
Constant,
and as a state of formation.
Play.
Continue to play with the beat.
Vibrate with me, so chaos can enter.
It is an invitation.
Come.
As water.
As the… More

#20 Transgressive Listening

by Stathis Gourgouris

Stathis Gourgouris is professor at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of Synaesthetics of the Polity (forthcoming, 2018); The Perils… More

#21 Outlawed Social Life

by Candice Hopkins

U'mista, in the Kwak'wala language, means the return of something or someone thought to be lost or taken. In Alert Bay and Cape Mudge, First Nations communities along the northwest coast of Canada repatriated… More

#22 I Owe You Everything

by Clémentine Deliss and Chief Robert Joseph

I Owe You Everything is a project that chooses and follows a series of contemporary thinkers, poets, and activists who are invited to construct a public “act of giving,” a critical and poetic ritual… More

#23 Interior Effects as an Outcome of War

by Bonita Ely

You are invited to join artist Bonita Ely in a workshop to discuss the ongoing, inter-generational effects of undiagnosed, untreated posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffered by family members of returned… More

#24 They Glow in the Dark

by Panayotis Evangelidis

They Glow in the Dark, Panayotis Evangelidis, Greece, 2013, 69 min.
Film screening and discussion with director Panayotis Evangelidis

Panayotis Evangelidis was born in Athens. He is a graduate of the Law… More

#25 An Evening with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens and Wet Dreams Water Ritual

An invitation to partake of the pleasures and perils of water. In collaborating with local artists, activists, musicians, sex workers, refugees, and other humans and non-humans.

Note: Please bring some… More

#26 The Waltz of the Dirty Streets

by Adespotes Skyles

This performance is inspired by all those people who at some point, in some place, in some way reacted to what was putting them down by posing thousands of questions. By all those who, if only for a brief… More

#27 Decolonizing Memory: Vita Futurities in the Americas

by Macarena Gómez-Barris

In this talk, Gómez-Barris asks how we might decolonize memory to activate different potential alternative and anti-capitalist futures. Specifically, the talk addresses how the evacuation of colonial… More

#28 Rojava is a Women’s Revolution: Jineology as Women’s Science

by Hawzhin Azeez

The revolution in Rojava in western Kurdistan has been gaining international traction across leftist groups and organizations. Despite the immense socio-political gains and the colossal fundamental changes… More

#29 Trans*: Bodies and Power in the Age of Transgenderism

by Jack Halberstam

Halberstam’s recent research has focused on the exponential increase in the last decade of public discussion in the US and Europe around transgenderism. In his upcoming book Trans*. A Quick and Quirky… More

#30 #Direnayol (#Resistayol)

by Rüzgâr Buşki

#Direnayol (#Resistayol), documentary by Rüzgâr Buşki, Turkey, 2016, 60 min.
Film premiere

A group of friends get together in Istanbul to make a film about the Turkish trans and sex worker activist Şevval… More

#31 Voices of Trans and Queer Politics in the Mediterranean

with Rüzgâr Buşki, Gizem Oruç, Şevval Kılıç, Nelli Kampouri, Margarita Tsomou, Maria Mitsopoulou aka Maria F. Dolores, Anna Apostolelli, and Tina Voreadi

With:

Rüzgâr Buşki, multimedia artist and producer, member of Kanka Productions
Gizem Oruç, musician, producer, and multimedia artist, member of Kanka Productions
Şevval Kılıç, sex worker, queer… More

#32 Queer Indie Gig, HTH Green to Blue Shock Treatment

by Prasini Lesvia

Prasini Lesvia is a queer music project created by Alkis Papastathopoulos. This non-radical idea began in late 2012 as a compulsion to communicate experiences of heartbreak, as well as to accept sexual/romantic… More

#33 DJ set

by Gizem Oruç

Gizem Oruç aka 6zm is a musician, producer, and multimedia artist. After receiving a Masters in Chemistry at Boğaziçi University, Oruç started studying Sonic Arts at Istanbul Technical University… More

#34 The Epic of Eleftheria

by Irena Haiduk and Eirini Vakalopoulou

In the East and Far East, the South, deep South, the other side of North, and the Far and the Deep West, history is mostly an oral technique. The poet is a witness. She records and weaves history and allows… More

The Open Form Societies

In 1787, eleven friends founded the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in England, with the aim of informing the public about the treatment of enslaved Africans within England, in the colonies, and on plantations, campaigning in favor of a new law to abolish the slave trade and enforce it on the high seas, and establishing areas in West Africa where Africans could live free of the risk of capture and sale into slavery. It pursued these proposals vigorously by writing and publishing antislavery books, abolitionist prints, posters, and pamphlets and by organizing public lecture tours and theatrical displays in English towns and cities. A year later, following the same model of action, La Société des Amis des Noirs was founded in France. Organized as “societies of friends,” both groups promoted the creation of social and friendly bonds between those who were considered legally and politically unequal. Two years later, in 1791 the revolt of slaves on the Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue developed into to the first major antislavery revolution. Serving as a backdrop to the revolts of slaves within the colonial empires, the societies functioned as a countercultural public program to develop an epistemological, discursive, political, and poetic imagination alternative to the colonial regime.

Revolution starts with reading and writing. Revolution starts with theater and public talks. With debating and sharing. Revolution starts with friendship.… More

The Society for the End of Necropolitics

Coordinated by Paul B. Preciado

At the turn of the last century, African thinker Achille Mbembe developed an urgent decolonial critique of Michel Foucault’s concept of “governmentality,” the process… More