The Parliament of Bodies: How does it feel to be a problem?

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

3 pm Introduction by Adam Szymczyk and Paul B. Preciado
3:15 pm Boris Buden, Fascism: A Crime in Search of Perpetrators
4 pm iQhiya, Fresh off the boat
4:45 pm Ulrich Schneider, Facing History and Ourselves: Preserving Memory – Acting Today – Change for the Future
5:30 pm Chto Delat, Here Me Burning
6 pm Evelyn Taocheng Wang with Arnisa Zeqo, Idle Chatter 2nd – Holzwege

7 pm BREAK

8 pm Dimitris Kousouris, Old and New Fascisms and Antifascisms
8:45 pm Lerato Shadi, Dinonyane tse Pedi
9:15 pm The Apatride Society of the Political Others (Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Nelli Kambouri, Margarita Tsomou), Integrated World Capitalism and the Ithagenia Condition: On Indigenous Knowledge in the European Crisis, Migration and Borders, the Coloniality of Contemporary Capitalism, and Self-determined Otherness
10 pm Zoe Mavroudi, The Witch Hunts of Athens: An Experiment for a New Europe
10:45 pm Raúl de Nieves, La Mosca/The fly

11:15 pm BREAK

12:30 am Adespotes Skiles, The waltz of the dirty streets
1:30 am LOTIC

(Mattin, Unscheduled Interventions)

Friday, April 28, 2017

10 am–3 pm Georgia Sagri, Attempt. Come
3 pm Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Questions About the Double-headed Monster That Is Destroying Life on the Planet. And How to Deal with It
3:45 pm Grada Kilomba, Illusions
4:15 pm Tatiana Roque, Back to the Closet! A Backlash Against Emerging Political Subjectivities
5 pm Zülfukar Çetin, Taking Control of One’s Own Body: Refugee Sex Workers and Moralizing the Sex of Others
5:45 pm Angelo Plessas/The Noospheric Society: Invitation for the 6th Eternal Internet Brotherhood/Sisterhood
6 pm María Galindo, Manifesto and How to Deal with the Feminist Insurrection

7 pm BREAK

8 pm–10:30 pm ALLIANCES OF MINOR INSTITUTIONS
Stavros Stavrides, Emergent Common Spaces: Reinventing the Politics of Sharing
Anna Dević/WHW, From Partisan Exhibitions to Exhibitions of Partisanship
Gigi Argyropoulou, (Im)potential Resistances
Emanuele Braga, Beyond work and private property, the Macao experience as an Institution of the Commons
Maria F Dolores and Mata Aharis, Clerking
Vasyl Cherepanyn, Thinking Under Attack: on the International Principles of Contemporary Antifascism
Olga Lafazani, Subverting the Borders Between Host and Hosted. The Everyday Life in City Plaza Project
Chto Delat (Dmitry Vilensky), To be a dissident: screening and questioning

10:30 pm BREAK

11:30 pm Vaginal Davis, No One Leaves Delilah
12:15 am Boris Baltschun and Serge Baghdassarians, Backing track
12:45 am The Boy

(Mattin: Unscheduled Interventions)

Saturday April 29, 2017

12 pm Film screening. Aris Chatzistefanou. Fascism Inc (73 min), Greece, 2015.
Greek with English/German subtitles.

4 pm–6:30 pm ALLIANCES BETWEEN ATHENS AND KASSEL ANTIFASCIST MOVEMENTS
Aris Chatzistefanou
Ayşe Güleç
Dimitris Kousouris
Thanassis Kampagiannis
Kassel postcolonial (Eric Otieno und Evelyn Wangui)
Forensic Architecture (Stefanos Levidis)
Magda Fyssa
Yannis Nifakos
Die Gesellschaft der Freunde von Halit und Initiative 6. April (Lilimor Kuht, Serdar Kazak, und Fritz Laszlo Weber)
Eleftheria Tompatzoglou
Natascha Sadr Haghighian
Niovi Zarampouka-Chatzimanou

7 pm BREAK

8 pm Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, An Alignment of Contested Bodies and Spaces: On Alterity, Asynchrony, and Heterogeneity
8:45 pm Alfredo Jaar, It is difficult
9:45 pm Cecilia Vicuña, Breaking the Heart of Creation
10:30 pm Schwabinggrad Ballett & Arrivati, Beyond Welcome

(Mattin: Unscheduled Interventions)

Adespotes Skiles is a self-organized musical and theatrical team found in 2008, the composition of which is being constantly renewed. The waltz of the dirty streets is the performative form that it uses in order to speak about sociopolitical reality. The performance is like a concert with female actresses and male musicians on stage. Adespotes Skiles support their shows through voluntary contributions/donations made by the audience, promoting free access to art and to every other self-organized venture. Adespotes Skiles is based in Athens.

Mata Aharis is a legal and political scientist from Greece. She has specialized in asylum law and has worked for asylum organizations in Athens as a lawyer. She is particularly interested in queer asylum and the institutionalization of border politics.

Gigi Argyropoulou is a researcher, theorist, director, and curator working in the fields of performance and cultural practice. She has initiated and organized festivals, conferences, performances, actions, and cultural collaboration projects both inside and outside institutions. She is a founding member of Green Park, Mavili Collective, Institute for Live Arts Research, Kolektiva Omonia, and F2 Performance Unit/Mkultra. She recently co-initiated and co-curated the first Performance Biennial in Athens in 2016. Argyropoulou lives and works in Athens and London.

AMOQA, Athens Museum of Queer Arts

b_books is a Berlin-based independent publishing house, bookstore, and cultural platform.

Serge Baghdassarians and Boris Baltschun are artists and composers who have been collaborating regularly since 1999. Their work oscillates between ether, installation, and performance (sound-based and other formats). They find and invent situations and narratives, abolishing the distinction between fiction and reality—always with an ear for the particularities of language and materials. Most recently they finished ate feat. ed d.: obey god, a radio play based on the evanescent nature of a single sentence, and they exhibited echo park, an audiovisual installation combining modified cars with modified balloons. Future projects include an installation featuring prenatal bird song, a performance for four speaking singers, and a piece on the change of taxonomic nomenclature for animals in Turkey. Baghdassarians and Baltschun are based in Berlin.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi is a renowned contemporary theorist and activist. His work is mainly dedicated to the relationship between culture, media, and social movement. His most recent book is And. Phenomenology of the End (2015). Berardi lives and works in Bologna.

Emanuele Braga is an artist, researcher, choreographer, and activist. He is cofounder of the dance and theater company Balletto Civile (2003), the contemporary art project Rhaze (2011), cofounder and developer of MACAO, a new center for art and culture (2012), and cofounder of Landscape Choreography (2012), an art platform questioning the role of the body under capitalism. His research focuses on models of cultural production and processes of social transformation. Recent performing art projects include Choreographic Speech (2013), R-Republic (2014), and F***king Good Talent (2015). His work also comprises theoretical issues of political economy, the institution of the commons, and labor rights (including the book La moneta del comune published with Andrea Fumagalli in 2015). Braga lives and works in Milan.

Boris Buden is a writer, cultural critic, and translator. He studied Philosophy in Zagreb and received his PhD in Cultural Theory from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In the 1990s he was editor of the magazine and publishing house Arkzin in Zagreb. He is a board member of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (eipcp), Vienna. His books and articles cover topics related to philosophy, politics, translation, linguistics, the post-communist condition, and cultural and art criticism. Buden is based in Zagreb and Berlin.

Zülfukar Çetin is a lecturer at the Alice Salomon Hochschule in Berlin and a researcher at the Department of History at the University Basel. Currently, he is a spokesperson of the Turkish Union in Berlin and Brandenburg. Çetin has published several books, among them Gespräche über Rassismus. Perspektiven und Widerstände (Conversations on Racism. Perspectives and Resistances, 2015, with Savaş Taş) and Schwule Sichtbarkeit, schwule Identität. Kritische Perspektiven (Gay Visibility, Gay Identity. Critical Perspectives, 2016, together with Heinz-Jürgen Voß). Çetin lives and works in Berlin.

Aris Chatzistefanou is a journalist, radio producer and creator of the documentaries Debtocracy (2011), Catastroika (2012), Fascism Inc (2015), and This Is Not A Coup (2016). He has worked for BBC World Service, The Guardian, and other international media. He is the author of three books on current affairs. Chatzistefanou lives and works in Athens.

Vasyl Cherepanyn is Head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC, Kiev) and an editor of the Political Critique magazine (Ukrainian edition). He works as a lecturer at the Cultural Studies Department of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and holds a PhD in Philosophy (aesthetics). Also he worked as a guest lecturer at European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, at the “Political Critique” Institute for Advanced Studies in Warsaw, Poland, and at Greifswald University, Germany. In 2015, VCRC received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award for Culture for its activities. The Visual Culture Research Center was also the organizer of The School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015. Cherepanyn lives and works in Kiev.

Vaginal Davis is the internationally acclaimed intersexed doyenne of intermedia arts and sciences. Her beat is galactic. Born in Los Angeles but based in Berlin, Germany since 2005 where she works with CHEAP Kollektiv founded in 2001 by Susanne Sachße, Marcuse Siegelstein, and Daniel Hendrickson. Davis has curated and hosted the performative film event Rising Stars, Falling Stars since 2007, now located at silent green Kulturquartier through the auspices of Arsenal Institut fur Film und Videokunst. She is a frequent guest professor at colleges, art schools, and universities globally, teaching her spiky brand of live art that utilizes the DBD (doing-by-doing) method.

Raúl de Nieves is a multimedia artist, performer, and musician. His body of work encompasses narrative painting, decadent multimedia performance (often with his band Haribo), large-scale figurative sculpture, live music, ornamentally crafted shoes, and garments. De Nieves has exhibited widely, including at Mendes Wood DM (Sao Paulo), MoMA Ps1, The Museum of Art and Design, Rod Bianco (Oslo), Shoot the Lobster, and elsewhere. He has also performed at Artists Space, BOFFO, The Kitchen, MoMA Ps1, Performa 13, Real Fine Arts, and numerous other venues. In 2015, he was included in Ps1’s Greater New York. De Nieves will also take part in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Raúl de Nieves is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Chto Delat was constituted in May 2003 in St. Petersburg in an action called The Refoundation of Petersburg. Shortly afterwards, the original, as yet nameless core group began publishing an international newspaper called Chto Delat? (What is to be done?). Chto Delat sees itself as a community organizer for a variety of cultural activities intent on politicizing “knowledge production” through redefinitions of an engaged autonomy for cultural practice today and also as an artistic cell. In 2013, Chto Delat initiated an educational platform, School of Engaged Art in Petersburg. it also runs a space called Rosa’s House of Culture. Their artistic activity is realized across a range of media, and it includes art projects, seminars, and public campaigns. These activities are coordinated by a core group including Tsaplya Olga Egorova (artist), Artiom Magun (philosopher), Nikolay Oleynikov (artist), Natalia Pershina/Glucklya (artist), Alexey Penzin (philosopher), Alexander Skidan (poet and critic), Oxana Timofeeva (philosopher), Dmitry Vilensky (artist), and Nina Gasteva (choreographer).

Ana Dević is a member of the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom/WHW, formed in 1999 in Zagreb and Berlin. Its members are Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović as well as designer and publicist Dejan Kršić. WHW organizes a range of production, exhibition, and publishing projects and also directs Gallery Nova in Zagreb. Since its first exhibition in 2000, WHW has curated numerous international projects, including Collective Creativity at Fridericianum in 2005, the 11th Istanbul Biennial What Keeps Mankind Alive?, Istanbul in 2009, and One Needs to Live Self-Confidently…Watching for the Croatian pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, Really Useful Knowledge in Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2014, and David Maljković, Retrospective by appointment in Gallery Nova in 2015.

Maria F Dolores is a visual artist and performer. She has participated in various exhibitions and collaborative processes that merge art, sex, and politics. In 2015 she was granted a five-month fellowship to initiate AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts), a collective self-organized, hybrid space in Athens, Greece.

Forensic Architecture is a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. It includes a team of architects, scholars, filmmakers, designers, lawyers, and scientists who undertake research to formulate and present spatial analyses in legal and political forums.

Stefanos Levidis is an architect from Athens. He is a researcher at Forensic Architecture, where he currently helps investigate the murder of Halit Yozgat by the NSU in Kassel. He is also a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, engaging with issues of displacement, territory, and visibility at the borders of Europe through spatial practice. Levidis lives and works in London.

María Galindo was born in Bolivia. She is the founder of the anarcho feminist collective Mujeres Creando. She develops her activist practice around radio, graffiti, audiovisual productions, and writing. She is currently codirecting Radio Deseo, a radio station of La Paz and Alto.

Initiative 6. April: Kassel is the place where Halit Yozgat was murdered on the 6th of April by the NSU (National Socialist Underground). The main concern of all who are involved is to discuss the social preconditions and the impacts of the NSU murders. Initiative 6. April observes this dialogue within the local context of Kassel. We want to critically discuss the social conditions that allowed this terror to remain undiscovered and thereby enable deeper insights. Our view is based on the perspective of migrants and those who are affected by racism.
Serdar Kazak is a columnist and member of Initiative 6. April.
Lilimor Kuht is a political education worker for BiLan (the educational forum Learning from the NSU) and a member of Initiative 6. April.
Fritz Laszlo Weber is an activist and artist who works and researches on historical and current realities of communality. His approach is based on critically examining the sociopolitical framing of technological ensembles, such as architectures, infrastructures, and media. Fritz is currently a member of the preparation group for the people’s tribunal Unraveling the NSU Complex.

iQhiya is a collective of young black women living and working in Cape Town and Johannesburg using multiple artistic media, including performance, installation, video, photography, printmaking, and interdisciplinary practices. The group consists of eleven members, including Thulile Gamedze, Lungiswa Gqunta, Bronwyn Katz, Bonolo Kavula, Matlhogonolo Kelapile, Pinky Mayeng, Thandiwe Msebenzi, Sethembile Msezane, Sisipho Ngodwana, Asemahle Ntlonti, and Buhlebezwe Siwani. As a collective, the group works collaboratively, both through a fluid journey of reflection on who they are and what their role is within the larger creative community as well as through artworks that they present to the public. Additionally, the collective functions as a network, acknowledging each artist’s own practice and working as a supportive, dynamic community for creative black women, in which personal and professional experiences play into shaping one another’s ideas.

Alfredo Jaar is a Chilean-born artist, architect, and filmmaker. He creates installations, photographs, films, and community-based projects that explore issues around humanitarian crises and the relationship between the First and Third Worlds. Probing the contemporary over-saturation of media images and the limitations of art in representing atrocities, Jaar draws attention to global power and exploitation. Jaar lives and works in New York.

Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz is a Bolivian-German writer, editor, and philosopher specializing in materialist aesthetics, colonial economy, and the history of Latin American art. Since 2014 he has been a founding member of São Paulo’s Seminário Público Micropolíticas and co-coordinator of P.A.C.A. (Program for Autonomous Cultural Action). From 2008–11 he was co-curator of the exhibition and publication project Principio Potosí (The Potosí Principle), presented at Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and Museo Nacional de Arte (MUSEF), La Paz. He is the author of the book Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida: Block-Experiments in Cosmococa—Program in Progress (2013) and coeditor of several volumes, including Art and the Critique of Ideology After 1989 (2014). Hinderer Cruz lives and works in São Paulo.

Nelli Kambouri is a gender scholar who has been working at the Center for Gender Studies in the Department of Social Policy of Panteion University in Athens since 2005. She teaches classes on gender, labor, and social policy and conducts research on gender and logistics. She recently completed a research project on gender, science, and technology at the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH) on Crete. Her research, teaching, and publications focus on links between gender theory, migration, precarity, and social movements. Currently her main interest is in seeking ways to view the “crisis” in Greece through the lens of postcolonial theory and decolonial movements. Kambouri lives and works in Athens.

Thanasis Kampagiannis studied Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He did a Masters in Political Science and History at the Panteion University in Athens on the history of the trade union and the socialist movement in Greece in the interwar era. He has been active in the antifascist and antiracist movement. He is currently working as a lawyer in the trial of members of Golden Dawn, in which he is representing Egyptian fishermen who were attacked in their home by a battalion squad of the neo-Nazi organization.

Kassel postkolonial was founded in 2015 to reflect on local historic and present connections to colonialism.

Eric Otieno is a political scientist at the Department of Development and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kassel and an activist with Kassel Postkolonial and the UN Decade for People of African Descent. His academic interests and activism revolve around disturbing coloniality in the international political economy and habitually interrupting german colonial amnesia.

Evelyn Wangui, alias Miss Eve. is a visual artist whose work consists of comics, multilingual texts, gif animations, and installations that explore how power defines identity in a globalized world. Her work focuses on deconstructing images associated with colonial/neocolonial/postcolonial histories, particularly as represented in popular culture. She is part of the creative team from the Department of Theory and Praxis, Art University of Kassel who are currently designing the website for the department of Postcolonial Studies.

Grada Kilomba is a Portuguese interdisciplinary artist and writer. Her work draws on memory, trauma, race, gender, and the postcolonial condition. Her writing has been translated into several languages and has been presented internationally. Her artwork has been featured in renowned venues, such as the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo 2016, Rauma Biennal Balticum 2016, and ArtBasel 2016. She is best known for her unconventional writing and her “subversive use of artistic practices, bringing text into performance, and giving body, voice, and image to her own writings.” Her work involves a variety of formats, from video installations to staged readings, performances, text collage, the three-dimensional, and sound installations. Kilomba lives and works in Berlin.

Dimitris Kousouris is Assistant Professor in the Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies Department, University of Vienna. He has taught contemporary history at the Universities of Crete, Chicago, Columbia and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He specializes in Modern Greek and twentieth-century European and international history. His first book is a history of the trials of Nazi collaborators in postwar Greece. He is currently working on the impact of wars, civil wars, and revolutions in twentieth-century European law and politics and on a project exploring the population movements during the Greek War of Independence (1821–28). Kousouris lives and works in Vienna.

Olga Lafazani studied Economic and Regional Development at Panteion University in Athens and did her MA in Urban and Regional Planning in the Department of Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens. She has worked on several research projects, and her academic interests revolve around migration, borders/boundaries, gender, and space/place. Since early 2000 she has been involved in antiracist collectives and different networks advocating for social and political rights. Last year she was involved in the City Plaza Hotel project, a squat of an unused hotel that provides housing for 400 migrants.

Lotic is a DJ and producer J’Kerian Morgan. Raised in Houston, Texas and now operating out of Berlin, Morgan is a resident at the city’s famed Janus parties. In recent years he has evolved into one of the most original voices within Berlin’s club life. Lotic is known for harnessing abstract tendencies through hybrid live/DJ sets of gut wrenching bass and lurching hip-hop rhythms, using occasional shards of contemporary R & B splintered with tactile hi-hats, and consistently swirling crowds into an unabashed party vortex.

Mattin is an artist from Bilbao currently living in Berlin who works with noise and improvisation. His work seeks to address the social and economic structures of experimental sonic and artistic production through live performance, recordings, and writing. Using a conceptual approach, he aims to question the nature, parameters, and conventions of improvisation, specifically the relationship between the idea of “freedom” and the constant innovation that it traditionally implies.

Zoe Mavroudi is a filmmaker, playwright, award-winning screenwriter and actress. Her theater work has been produced in Europe and the US. Her first film, the documentary Ruins: Chronicle of an HIV witch-hunt, was coproduced with independent journalists and media in Greece and has been screened in cinemas, universities, and international festivals in many countries and on Greek public television. Mavroudi lives and works in London.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, PhD and documenta 14 Curator at Large, is an independent art curator and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of the art space SAVVY Contemporary Berlin and editor-in-chief of SAVVY Journal for critical texts on contemporary African art. His recent curatorial projects include Unlearning the Given: Exercises in Demodernity and Decoloniality of Ideas and Knowledge, SAVVY Contemporary, 2016; If You Are So Smart, Why Ain’t You Rich? Discursive Program – Wir Sind Alle Berliner: 1884–2014, Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin, 2015; Satch Hoyt, Riding Celestial Vessels, Galerie Wedding, Berlin, 2015; and Emeka Ogboh, No Food for Lazy Man, Galerie Wedding, Berlin, 2015. He is co-curator of the year-long art project An Age of Our Own Making for Images, Holbæk, Roskilde, and Copenhagen, 2016. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung lives and works in Berlin.

Yannis Nifakos is an Athens-based rap artist and member of Pavlos Fyssas’ music band (E13, ΝΤΟΠΑΖ [ntopaz].

Angelo Plessas is an artist. The focus of his work is networking the offline with the online in ways that help us understand both conditions. Over the last five years he has organized annual, weeklong gatherings of The Eternal Internet Brotherhood/Sisterhood and most recently of the Experimental Education Protocol. He is the initiator of The Noospheric Society. Plessas lives and works in Athens.

Paul B. Preciado is a philosopher, curator, transgender activist, and a leading thinker in the study of gender and sexual politics. He is currently Curator of Public Programs of documenta 14. Preciado lives and works in Athens.

Tatiana Roque is a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and heads the Teachers’ Union of the university. Roque has been at the forefront of protests against the austerity measures currently being implemented; studies French philosophy, political theory, and history of science; and writes about the protests in Brazil, the effects of neoliberalism on subjectivities, and the dilemmas faced by the left. Roque is coeditor of the feminist magazine Revista DR (www.revistadr.com.br) and member of P.A.C.A. (Program for Autonomous Cultural Action). Roque lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian is part of the coalition that organizes the people’s tribunal Unraveling the NSU-Complex. She is also active in the antiracist and antifascist struggle. She lives and works in Berlin.

At the center Georgia Sagri’s practice lies the exploration of performance as an ever-evolving field within social and visual life. Most of her work is influenced from her on-going engagement in political movements and struggles, on issues of autonomy, empowerment, and self-organization (Void Network 1997–2001, Occupy Wall Street, 2011, Embros Theater Occupation 2012–13). She is the founder of the audio-only magazine FORTÉ (magazineforte.com) and SALOON, an ongoing curatorial project. In 2014, she initiated Ύλη[matter]HYLE (hyle.gr) a semi-personal/semi-public space in the heart of Athens. Sagri lives and works in New York and Athens.

Ulrich Schneider taught for many years at the University of Kassel and is currently teaching German and History in Bebra. His expertise is in German, history and political science. Schneider is active as a publicist, lecturer, and leading member of the Association of the Persecuted of Nazi-regime (VVN) – Association of Antifascists, as well as General Secretary of the International Federation of the Resistance Fighters (FIR). He is the author of various publications on topics of antifascist resistance, regional history and neofascism today.

Schwabinggrad Ballett is a political and performance collective that formed at the turn of the century in Hamburg. Arrivati is a union of refugees and people of color. The two collectives have been working with each other for over two years. During demonstrations and on the street they have developed a kind of experimental dance music played on instruments that you can carry easily on the street: beaten-up drums, analogue synthesizers, melodicas, bells, congas, samplers from the 1990s, or the Böhmat, an organ machine from the 1960s with a Brecht-like sound. These musical experiments resulted in the album Beyond Welcome, dealing with the dictates of borders, jazz, postpunk, electronic Afro-kraut music, Germans and non-Germans, and coming together above and beyond a culture of welcome. Not least, Beyond Welcome is a sweat-dripping live show with ten musicians.

The artistic practice of Lerato Shadi is a way of placing herself in the world—as a woman, as a Black woman, and as a South African. She explores problematic assumptions projected onto the Black female body and how performance, video and installation create a space for artists to engage with preconceived notions, making the body both visible and invisible. Shadi lives and works in Berlin.

Stavros Stavrides is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, where he teaches a graduate course on social housing as well as a postgraduate course on the meaning of metropolitan experience. He has published five books (as well as numerous articles) on spatial theory: The Symbolic Relation to Space (1990), Advertising and the Meaning of Space (1996), The Texture of Things (1996), From the City-as-Screen to the City-as-Stage (2002, National Book Award), Suspended Spaces of Alterity (2010), and Towards the City of Thresholds (in English, 2010). His research is currently focused on different emancipating spatial practices and urban commoning. Stavrides lives and works in Athens.

Adam Szymczyk is cofounder of the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw, where he worked as curator from 1997 to 2003 before becoming Director of Kunsthalle Basel. In Basel he organized over 100 exhibitions through the end of 2014. In 2008, he curated When things cast no shadow, the 5th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, in collaboration with Elena Filipovic. He is a member of the Board of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and in 2011 he received the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement from the Menil Foundation in Houston. Szymczyk was appointed Artistic Director of documenta 14 by an independent international jury in November 2013. Szymczyk currently lives and works in Athens.

The Boy has directed four feature films that have been presented in numerous festivals worldwide. The Boy has also directed music videos and theater plays. As a musician, he has released more than twenty albums including a variety of projects and he has performed more than 400 shows. The Boy is based in Athens.

Eleftheria Tompatzoglou is a lawyer and member of Athens Barrister Association. She received her law degree from the National Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is representing the family of murder victim Pavlos Fyssas in the trial against a member of the Golden Dawn.

Margarita Tsomou is a Greek author, publisher, dramaturge, and curator. She is the publisher of the pop-feminist Missy Magazine and writes for German newspapers and radio. Her artistic collaborations and curatorial projects have been presented at theaters such as the Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Maxim Gorki Theater, and Volksbühne in Berlin; Kampnagel, Hamburg; and the Onassis Cultural Center, Athens. She is currently finishing her book on the representation of the many in the context of the Greek Indignados Movement and the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens in 2011. She is part of the publishing collective b_books in Berlin and the activist/artist group Schwabinggrad Ballett in Hamburg. Tsomou lives and works in Berlin and on the Greek island of Skiathos.

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker and activist. Her work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against elected president Salvador Allende. Vicuña’s work began in the mid 1960s in Chile as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.” Her multidimensional works begin as a poem, an image that morphs into a film, a song, a sculpture, or a collective performance. These ephemeral, site specific performance installations in nature, city streets, and museums combine ritual and assemblage. Vicuña lives and works in Santiago de Chile and New York.

Evelyn Taocheng Wang is an artist living in Amsterdam. Through her diverse practice, including classical drawings and paintings as well as videos and performances, she addresses ostensible fixed notions of identity, sexuality, gender roles, ethnicity, and socioeconomic backgrounds. In recent years, Wang’s main interest has been in “body culture,” for which she has researched different (art) histories of the body from a personal perspective. Wang studied at the Städelschule and was resident artist at De Ateliers (2012–14). In 2016 she was awarded the Dorothea von Stetten Award at Kunstmuseum Bonn. She recently had a solo show at the Frans Hals Museum | Hallen Haarlem and participated in Manifesta 11 in Zurich.

Niovi Zarampouka-Chatzimanou studied Architecture at the University of Thessaly and received her Masters in Cultural Management from Panteion University in Athens. She has worked on several participatory art projects in Greece and Italy. In 2015 she co-curated the project ΜΕSA Museum of People’s Free Thinking, focusing with students on several prisons and rehab facilities in Greece in cooperation with the EMST National Museum of Contemporary Art. She is currently working as Community Liaison for documenta 14 in Athens.

Arnisa Zeqo is an art historian based in Athens. In 2011 she cofounded rongwrong, a space for art and theory in Amsterdam. Recently she was curator in residence at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College where she focused on works of art at the edge of the performative and wrote the conceptual essay “Let’s Spit on Szeemann.” She is part of the team of documenta 14 in Athens as Education Coordinator.