Introducing the parliament of bodies
Originally conceived as the Public Programs of documenta 14, but having failed to transform documenta’s economy and institution, the PoB mutated into an apatride institution-in-becoming and without constitution, that parasites other institutions to provoke critical metamorphosis and repolitization.
The parliament is considered to be one of the oldest political techniques of government based on democratic representation. Although the name Parliament comes from the French “paler”—referring to the act of discussing matters of public government, the functions of representation, legislation and parliamentary control—the term can be traced back to the Greek Assembly (εκκλεσια). Developed in the 5th century BC in Athens, the Assembly was an institution of direct democracy where each citizen had one vote to decide on the key questions of the city: war, taxes, economy, education, laws… In ancient Athens, the citizen (politikos) was the inhabitant of the polis. Nevertheless, the status of citizen was highly restricted (only granted for 15% of the population), excluding women, children, metics, slaves, sick people, and men from the lower classes. As feminist and political scholars have pointed out, the Athenian assembly was a paradoxical device, at the same time framing the conditions of political representation and limiting access to the political domain. Since the Haiti revolution, the anti-colonial movements, the workers movements, the development of the feminist, gay, lesbian and trans movements, amongst others, the limits and functions of the Parliament have been constantly redefined, and its alleged forms of political representation radically questioned.
Born in 2016 in Athens, the Parliament of Bodies took its name and its vocation from the experience of the failure of representative democracy in Greece during the “OXI” referendum of July 2015. When the Greek government refused to accept the citizens’ decision to reject the conditions of the bailout, the national Greek parliament appeared as an institution in ruins, unable of representing the people. At the same time, for many days, Syntagma Square and the streets of Athens were filled with voices and bodies of thousands of Athenians and Greeks. But also thousands of migrants and refugees that were arriving every day to the Piraeus port. We needed a counter-Parliament of living bodies beyond markets and nations, as it also became obvious in the city of Kassel and its entanglements with the military industry and its weaponry export to many sites of world conflicts.
Acknowledging the crisis of the modern utopia of “public space” within the framework of the European Community—in which d14 was institutionally inscribed—but also the unprecedented proliferation of counter-power movements within art, culture and society, the d14 public programs refused to be either a discursive side-event attached to the exhibition program or yet another marathon of 100 hundred lectures. Instead, documenta 14 addressed the challenge to imagine the Parliament of Bodies, an abstract machine that unpacks the form from within the frame of the public programs, while extending itself to the exhibition and the education programs alike. These are some of its working questions: 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 re-written? Can an exhibition be thought as a parliament of bodies, as an ensemble of relationships between animate and inanimate beings producing agency through cooperation?
The idea of the Parliament of Bodies finds its inspiration in the micropolitical of self-organization, collaborative practices and radical pedagogic experiments of a large array of historical, utopian and art insurgent movements, but also in the most recent experiments of “new institutionality” and counter-govermentality taking place within the Occupy Movement, 15M in Spain, the transfeminist and queer movements, the indigenous and first peoples movements, the hackers, pirates and Anonymous movements, the disability and crip struggles, the anti-prison, anti-psychiatric movements worldwide…Pointing to its constitutive outside, the Greek notion of “métoikos” (meaning “those who change home”—from “méto,” to changer, and “oikos,” dwelling place, and including both slaves and foreigners) becomes relevant to the Parliament of Bodies, since it is made of visitors and migrants, travellers and refugees…occasionally or permanently lacking full political recognition in National and existing governmental parliaments.
As an institutional building, democracy has not been finished and yet it is already in ruins. Growing within ruins and fakes, the Parliament of Bodies is a productive parody, a queering of traditional political institutions, and the occasion for building a state-less post-neoclassic heterotopia.
The PoB is made of those who lack full political recognition within the framework of the nation-state. It does neither provide a single discourse on identity, nor a homogeneous space of race, gender or sexual representation. On the contrary, it aims to create a new forum for artist and activist, an open arena of experimentation, performativity, media production and debate, essential for new planetary somatic democracy to arouse.
Nicole Loraux, Les Enfants d’Athéna. Idées athéniennes sur la citoyenneté et la division des sexes, Paris, Maspero, 1981 ; Sarah B. Porneroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves. Women in Classical Antiquity, London, 1976 ; Giorgio Agamben, L’uso dei corpi. Homo Sacer IV, 2., Neri Pozza, Roma, 2014.
