Photo Caroline Bernard. The Parliament of Bodies en mode repos à Kassel, dans le hall semi-circulaire à l’entrée du Fredericianum.
En mode actif
The Parliament of Bodies, the Public Programs of documenta 14, emerged from the experience of the so-called long summer of migration in Europe, which revealed 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 Parliament of Bodies acts against the individualization of bodies but also against the transformation of bodies into a mass, against the transformation of the public into a marketing target. Against essential origins, reified borders, and identity politics, the Parliament of Bodies proposes to act as a space for cultural activism, inventing new affects and creating synthetic alliances between different world struggles for sovereignty, recognition, and survival. Inspired by micropolitical self-organization, collaborative practices, radical pedagogy, and artistic experiments, the Parliament of Bodies is a critical device to queer both the ruins of democratic intuitions as well as the traditional formats of the exhibition and public programs. It brings together artists, activists, theorists, performers, workers, migrants, et cetera to experiment collectively on a radical transformation of the public sphere and the proliferation of new forms of subjectivity. The Parliament of Bodies is neither a bank nor a collection of data, neither “folk” nor a corporation. The Parliament of Bodies began construction in Athens seven months before the opening of the documenta 14 exhibition, launching in September 2016 with 34 Exercises of Freedom at the Municipality Arts Center at Parko Eleftherias. Since then, it has been assembled through six Open Form Societies: the Noospheric Society, dedicated to alternative technologies of consciousness (coordinated with Angelo Plessas); the Apatride Society for the Political Others (coordinated with Nelli Kambouri, Margarita Tsomou, and Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz), exploring anticolonial discourses and practices, global migration, and the current transformation of the nation-state; the Society of Friends of Sotiria Bellou (developed with AMOQA, Athens Museum of Queer Arts), dedicated to the proliferation of queer and transfeminist politics; the Society for the End of Necropolitics (coordinated with Georgia Sagri), which looks for ways to counter the technologies of death of capitalist colonial history; the Society of Friends of Ulises Carrión (coordinated with Arnisa Zeqo), which takes the tactics of the eponymous Mexican artist as a starting point to examine cultural strategies and practices of noninstitutionalized art; and the Cooperativist Society (coordinated with Emanuele Braga and Enric Duran), working on circular economy and “communing.” The Open Form Societies have been modeled on La Société des amis des noirs, created in France in 1788 to abolish the slave trade, promoting the creation of social and friendly bonds between those who were considered citizens and those who were considered legally and politically unequal. They pursued these aims vigorously by writing and publishing antislavery books, prints, posters, and pamphlets and by organizing public lecture tours and theatrical displays in the towns and cities of Europe. At the heart of colonial empires, antislavery societies functioned as a countercultural public program to develop epistemological, discursive, political, and poetic-imagination alternatives to the colonial regime. Likewise, the Open Form Societies of the Parliament of Bodies aim to act at the heart of the exhibition device, within the complexity of a global neoliberal economy, in a context of growing neocolonial and neofascist discourses. The treatment imposed on Greece since the beginning of the new century has announced the current transformation of global Western politics. Beginning in January 2017, the singular societies began to cross-pollinate, creating friction and bringing different languages and practices into dialogue. Three weeks after the April opening of the exhibition in Athens, the Parliament of Bodies gathered for the first time in Kassel, calling for an antifascist, transfeminist, and antiracist coalition. The Parliament of Bodies took 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 Mbembe has called “becoming black of the world.” That event gathered all the Athenian societies of the Parliament together with the Society of Friends of Halit, the first society of the Parliament in Kassel, dedicated to fight institutionalized forms of racism and named to honor the memory of Halit Yozgat, murdered in Kassel by neo-Nazis in 2006. June 2017 sees the inception of other new societies, such as the Society of Friends of Lorenza Böttner, named after the mouth and foot painter and performer Lorenza and dedicated to physical and neurological diversity and ghting disability oppression. As an institution-in-becoming and without constitution, the Parliament of Bodies inhabits sites of contested histories whose memories force us to question hegemonic and romanticized narratives of democratic Europe. In Athens, it is located in Parko Eleftherias at the Municipality Arts Center, a building that was the headquarters of military police during the years of dictatorship in Greece, between 1967 and 1974. In Kassel, the Parliament of Bodies is hosted in the rotunda of the Fridericianum. Constructed under Friedrich II, the building opened in 1779 as a library and one of the first public museums in Europe. In 1810, Jérôme Bonaparte, King of Westphalia and Napoleon’s youngest brother, for a short period transformed the rotunda of the Fridericianum into the first parliamentary building in Germany. In the 1930s, the building also served as a gathering place for the Nazi Party, before being burnt to ruins during bombing raids on Kassel in 1941 and 1943. From 1955, it has been the most emblematic site of the documenta exhibition. Throughout the run of documenta 14, the Parliament of Bodies with its societies will be active both in Athens and Kassel, like a dissonant and yet synchronic practice of heteroglossia and heterogeneity. Nomadic and performative, working as a stateless heterotopia by means of multiplication and displacement, the Parliament of Bodies acts within the spaces of the exhibition as well as within spaces of both cities (theaters, associations, studios, squares … ) that are experimenting with new forms of sovereignty beyond the norm.
Le Parlement des corps est ouvert à Athènes. Ici, Toni Negri et Paul B. Preciado, lors d’une séance. Les blocs de coussins sont recouverts d’un imprimé béton.
Le Centre d’arts municipal, bâtiment aménagé par l’architecte Andreas Angelidakis avec Demos, un mobilier de « ruines », des blocs de mousse habillés de vinyle imprimé façon béton, pour le Parlement des corps > http://jlggb.net/blog5/?p=1935
Dans l’entretien livré par la revue les Inrockuptibles du 04/04/2017, Paul explique les circonstances de son engagement auprès d’Adam Szymczyk et ce dont il est en charge en tant que curateur associé : les programmes publics de la Documenta, intitulés Parlement des corps installé dans «le Parko Eleftherias, « parc de la Liberté », proposé par la Mairie d’Athènes. Or [dit Paul] «en arrivant, nous avons réalisé qu’il s’agissait en réalité de la base de la police militaire durant la dictature. Néanmoins, nous avons décidé de nous y installer quand même. Pour moi, qui suis d’origine espagnole, ça avait d’autant plus de sens que l’on ne parle pas non plus en Espagne de la mémoire de la dictature.» […]
«Nous avons tout de suite pensé que nous ne voulions pas d’un programme public qui serait comme une note de bas de page venant compléter l’exposition principale. Une simple série de conférences où des théoriciens viennent interpréter les œuvres des artistes n’aurait pas eu de sens à Athènes. Ce qui en revanche en avait, c’était d’ouvrir un espace de débat et de critique où pourraient se rencontrer les artistes, les universitaires, les activistes, les réfugiés, les personnes travaillant avec eux et le public, pour se poser collectivement la question moyens de pallier l’effondrement démocratique. […]
«J’ai ouvert le programme public avec une hypothèse. En 2007, lorsqu’a commencé l’exclusion et la diabolisation des pays du Sud de l’Europe, j’ai eu l’impression que ces pays n’étaient pas uniquement les mauvais élèves de l’Union Européenne en termes économiques, mais qu’il fallait également y lire une vraie question politique, quasiment jamais formulée explicitement. A savoir qu’une grande partie de ces pays sont passés sans transition de la dictature au néolibéralisme dans les années 1960-70, sans que ne se pose vraiment la question d’une vraie liberté démocratique. J’ai ouvert les programmes publics en soulevant ce point : comment exercer la liberté dans la condition contemporaine du néolibéralisme global ? Je ne voulais pas entièrement renoncer à la question de la liberté, mais plutôt la reposer avec Foucault, c’est-à-dire non pas comme un droit que chacun possèderait de manière individuelle, mais comme une pratique qui se conçoit en exercice et dans le temps.» […]
«Suite au référendum grec du 5 juillet 2015 qui s’est soldé par un « non » aux mesures d’austérité, et dont le gouvernement n’a pas pu tenir compte, il y a eu d’énormes manifestations en face du parlement. Les rues étaient remplies de grecs qui sortaient dans la rue pour protester contre le gouvernement, en même temps que des centaines de milliers de réfugiés arrivaient à Athènes, attendaient et dormaient partout où ils le pouvaient. Les rues étaient prises d’assaut par un millier de corps qui n’avaient plus aucune représentation, ni politique, ni artistique. C’est à ce moment que nous avons décidé d’intituler le programme « Le Parlement des Corps ».» […] «La Documenta a souvent contribué à redéfinir les formats de l’exposition. A présent, il faut commencer à penser des processus critiques qui rassemblent sur le même plan les corps, sans distinction de nationalité, de genre ou de domaine d’activité.»