The Parliament of Bodies, How does it feel to be a problem?
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Kassel April 27–29, 2017 |
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The Parliament of Bodies, the Public Programs of documenta 14, emerged from the experience of the so-called “long summer of migration” in Europe, revealing the simultaneous failure not only of modern representative democratic institutions but also of ethical practices of hospitality. The Parliament was in ruins. The real Parliament was on the streets, constituted by unrepresented and undocumented bodies resisting austerity measures and xenophobic policies. The planet is going through a process of “counter-reform” that seeks to reinstall white-masculine supremacy and to undo the democratic achievements that the workers’ movements, the anti-colonial, indigenous, ecologist, feminist, sexual liberation, and anti-psychiatric movements have struggled to grant during the last two centuries. In this context, The Parliament of Bodies becomes a site of activism, alliance, and cooperation. After eight months of activity in Athens, The Parliament of Bodies is gathering for the first time in Kassel calling for an anti-fascist, trans-feminist, and anti-racist coalition. The Parliament of Bodies takes W. E. B. Du Bois’s question “How does it feel to be a problem?” as a possible interpellation directed today at the “99 percent” of the planet, taking into consideration the process that African philosopher Achille Mbembé has called “becoming black of the world.” Whereas the modern colonial and patriarchal regime invented the “worker,” the “domestic woman,” the “black,” the “indigenous,” and the “homosexual,” today new government technologies are inventing new forms of subjection: from the criminalized Muslim to the undocumented migrant, from the precarious worker to the homeless, from the disabled to the sick as consumers of the industries of normalization to the sexualized worker, and the undocumented transsexual. This performative gathering establishes no hierarchies between radically different knowledge, languages, and practices, between activism and performance, between theory and poetry, between art and politics: collectively, we experiment with the construction of a public space of visibility and enunciation. This is a gathering of those who have become a “problem” for today’s hegemonic discourse: we don’t share identities, we are bound by different forms of oppression, of displacement and dispossession more than by our skin color, our sex, gender, or sexuality. The Parliament of Bodies is not made of identities but of critical processes of disidentification. (Paul B. Preciado)
PROGRAM Thursday April 27, 2017 FRIDERICIANUM 3 pm Introduction by Adam Szymczyk and Paul B. Preciado 7 pm BREAK 8 pm Dimitris Kousouris, Old and New Fascisms and Antifascisms 11:15 pm BREAK 12:30 am Adespotes Skiles, The Waltz of the Dirty Streets (Mattin, Unscheduled Interventions) Friday April 28, 2017 FRIDERICIANUM 10 am–3 pm Georgia Sagri, Attempt. Come 7 pm BREAK 8 pm–10:30 pm ALLIANCES BETWEEN MINOR INSTITUTIONS 10:30 pm BREAK 11:30 pm Vaginal Davis, No One Leaves Delila (Mattin, Unscheduled Interventions) Saturday April 29, 2017 FRIDERICIANUM 12 pm Film screening, Aris Chatzistefanou, Fascism Inc, 2015, Greece, 73 min. 4 pm–6:30 pm ALLIANCES BETWEEN ANTIFASCIST MOVEMENTS FROM ATHENS AND KASSEL 7 pm BREAK 8 pm Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, An Alignment of Contested Bodies and Spaces: On Alterity, Asynchrony, and Heterogeneity (Mattin, Unscheduled Interventions) |
